Scope and Expectations

We seek original, high-quality research submissions that improve and further the knowledge of the core ASPLOS disciplines: Operating Systems, Programming Languages, Computer Architecture, and their intersection.

We particularly encourage new ideas and approaches. We embrace research that directly targets new problems in innovative ways. The research may target diverse goals, such as throughput, latency, energy, and security. Non-traditional topics that are centered in the core ASPLOS disciplines are encouraged, and the review process will be sensitive to the challenges of multidisciplinary work in emerging areas. We welcome submission of “experience papers” that have a novel component and that clearly articulate the lessons learned. We likewise welcome submissions whereby novelty lies in furthering our understandings of existing systems, e.g., by uncovering previously unknown, valuable insights or by convincingly refuting prior published results and common wisdom. We value submissions more highly if they are accompanied by clearly defined artifacts not previously available, including traces, original data, source code, or tools developed as part of the submitted work.

Alphabetically sorted areas of interest related to practical aspects of computer architecture, programming languages, and operating systems include but are not limited to:

Heterogeneous architectures and accelerators
Internet services, cloud computing, and datacenters
Memory, storage, networking, and I/O
Power, energy, and thermal management
Profiling, debugging, and testing
Security, reliability, and availability
Systems for enabling parallelism and computation on big data
Virtualization and virtualized systems
Experimental methodologies
The topics listed above, as applied to existing, emerging, and nontraditional compute platforms at all scales

A good submission will typically: motivate a significant problem; propose a practical solution or approach that makes sense; demonstrate not just the pros but also the cons of the proposal using sound experimental methods; explicitly disclose what has and has not been implemented; articulate the new contributions beyond previous work; and refrain from over-claiming, focusing the abstract and introduction sections primarily on the difference between the new proposal and what is already available. The latter statement should be interpreted broadly to also encompass studies that broaden our understanding of existing systems (rather than suggest new ones), which may constitute a significant problem in its own right. Submissions will be judged on relevance, novelty, technical merit, clarity. Submissions are expected to adhere to SIGPLAN’s Empirical Evaluation Guidelines and all the policies specified below.