ASPLOS Related Work

An ASPLOS reviewer pool is assembled from three communities, and each reviewer checks whether their literature is handled competently. Related work at this venue is therefore a coverage problem across parallel lanes — a paper positioned beautifully against the OS literature and blankly against the architecture literature reads as half-researched to half its reviewers.

The five lanes

For the last lane, mine the venue's own memory: the ACM DL ASPLOS series and the Influential Paper Award list (see ../../resources/exemplars/library.md) identify the papers the community regards as canonical for a given boundary.

Differentiate on the boundary, not the components

The distinctive ASPLOS positioning move: prior work usually shares components with yours (a similar hardware structure, a similar kernel policy) while drawing the hardware/software boundary elsewhere. Say precisely where each prior system draws it and why yours moves it:

Template, per closest-prior system:
  "<System> provides <capability> at <layer>, which requires <cost/assumption>.
   Because it keeps <decision> in <layer>, it cannot <the thing your boundary
   placement enables>. We move <decision> to <layer>, which is what makes
   <headline property> possible."

Three such paragraphs beat fifteen one-line dismissals — and the systems that get this treatment should be the ones a hostile reviewer would name.

Double-blind handling of your own line of work (2027 rules)

• Cite your prior published work in the third person, treated exactly like a competitor's system.
• Your own arXiv postings and tech reports are not prior publications under the 2027 CFP, and the submission may ignore them — you are not forced into contortions differentiating against your own preprint.
• A workshop paper this submission extends, or your related manuscript under review elsewhere, goes in as anonymized supplemental material so reviewers can judge the delta (mechanics in asplos-supplementary).
• Never use "removed for blind review" placeholders — disallowed wording.

Format constraints that reshape this section

ASPLOS's citation rules (verified 2026-07-08) have an underappreciated interaction with related work: every entry needs all co-authors' full first and last names and a DOI/link, which makes each citation long. Since references are outside the 11-page limit this costs no body pages — but it means bibliography hygiene is a real task: budget an editing pass to expand names (asplos-submission has the mechanical sweep) rather than discovering 90 malformed entries at the deadline.

Timing and staleness

• Sweep the most recent two editions of ASPLOS, ISCA, MICRO, SOSP/OSDI, and PLDI before each gate (the September 9, 2026 deadline follows a spring conference season — its output is your reviewers' freshest context).
• Concurrent work that appears between cycles: acknowledge it neutrally in a revision or camera-ready; a Major Revision's change note is an expected place to add "since submission" positioning.

Building the lane map before writing

Construct the section from a spreadsheet, not from memory:

1. For each lane, list the 5-10 systems a reviewer from that community would expect to see; source them from the last two editions' proceedings tables of contents (ACM DL for ASPLOS/ISCA/MICRO/SOSP; the respective sites for USENIX and SIGPLAN venues) rather than from citation chains, which propagate one group's blind spots.
2. Mark each entry: boundary-competitor (gets a template paragraph), component-overlap (grouped sentence), or context (grouped citation).
3. Have the co-author closest to each community audit their lane's list — the embarrassing omission is almost always in the lane nobody on the team calls home.
4. Recheck the map at every gate: between April and September a spring conference season publishes, and a reviewer's own new paper is the citation they miss first.

Using the venue's own canon

The Influential Paper Award list is a positioning instrument, not just an exemplar source: if your boundary has an award-validated ancestor (an accelerator argued from data movement, a virtualization boundary redraw — see ../../resources/exemplars/library.md), citing the lineage and stating your delta against it signals venue literacy to every senior reviewer. Conversely, discovering that a canon paper already occupies your claimed boundary is cheaper during this pass than in a review.

Where the section lives

With 11 figure-inclusive pages, a late monolithic related-work section is expensive real estate. The pattern that survives compression: inline differentiation at first mention for the two or three boundary-competitors (they are part of the argument, not an appendix to it), plus a compact lane-organized section that proves coverage. What must not be compressed away is the boundary-competitor analysis — cutting it saves half a page and costs the review that says "does not engage with <System>."

Output format

[Lane coverage] arch / OS / PL / accelerator / prior-ASPLOS — each: covered / thin / n-a
[Boundary paragraphs] closest-prior systems given the template treatment: list
[Hostile-reviewer test] the 3 systems a skeptic would name — all addressed? Y/N
[Own-work handling] third-person OK · supplements needed · arXiv stance decided
[Bibliography hygiene] full-name + DOI pass scheduled/done
[Staleness] newest cited edition per lane