Proceedings of the 7th ACM european conference on Computer Systems

It is our great pleasure to present the proceedings of the 7th ACM European Conference on Computer Systems. Ever since the first EuroSys conference in 2006, EuroSys has gained and maintained a reputation as one of the premier systems conferences in the world. This year is no exception. The program is thought-provoking, high quality, and very broad---with topics ranging from kernels to clouds; from storage to security; and from energy to multicore. In addition, the program includes 8 colocated workshops, 3 tutorials, posters and demos. We are thrilled to announce that Steve Furber (University of Manchester), one of the original designers of the BBC Micro and the ARM 32-bit RISC processor, will give the keynote about Biologically-Inspired Massively-Parallel Computing. With an acceptance rate of just 15%, the bar for papers to be accepted was exceptionally high. All papers in the program were first reviewed and subsequently heavily discussed at the PC meeting, and in the end, we admitted only the best and most interesting ones. The reviewing process was doubleblind. Authors' identities were revealed only after the PC meeting. So far, these PC discussions and the motivations for accepting or rejecting a paper at the PC meeting have remained hidden from the audience, and attendees have to figure out by themselves what motivated the program committee to accept or reject a certain paper. As we know from experience that such information is interesting, this year we decided to make the audience party to the deliberations of the program committee. For this reason, we sent a summary of the PC discussions to the authors of rejected papers and publish not only the accepted papers themselves, but also a summary of the reviews and the discussions on the conference web site. It is not the only novelty in this year's conference. To cope with the growing number of submissions, we decided to follow the model of some of the other top venues in growing the program committee and splitting it up in a PC light and a PC heavy. There is no distinction between the two, except that only heavies participated in round 3 of the reviewing process and attended the PC meeting in person. Incidentally, we are happy to report that several of the PC members "graduated" from the Shadow PCs of yesteryear! Growing the PC proved to be wise, because with 179 papers submitted, EuroSys 2012 sets a new record in terms of submissions. All on-topic papers received at least 3 reviews in round 1. Of the original 179, no fewer than 96 made it to round 2, where they received at least two more reviews. The PC discussed all of these in person at the PC meeting. In addition, papers in round 2 with strongly diverging reviews received an extra review in round 3. All in all, the PC members wrote more than 750 reviews! In addition to the regular PC, this year's EuroSys ran a shadow PC, consisting of talented young researchers that, hopefully, will provide the community the next wave of high quality PC members and scientists. The shadow PC was led by Rodrigo Rodrigues (MPI-SWS) who put in an admirable amount of time and energy to make the experience for everyone both useful and enjoyable. Moreover, the shadow PC was an excellent opportunity for authors to receive even more feedback on their work. Finally, the authors had an opportunity to rebut some of the reviewers' comments, which the PC also took into account for their final decision. When the dust settled at the PC meeting in Amsterdam, the EuroSys PC had selected 27 papers. All of the papers were shepherded by a PC member.