Call for Contributions

Scope and Topics

The ACM/SPEC International Conference on Performance Engineering (ICPE) is the leading international forum for presenting and discussing novel ideas, innovations, trends, and experiences in the field of performance engineering.

Performance, energy efficiency, and reliability are becoming central to the acceptance and sustainability of modern computing systems. Digitalization brings computing technology closer to people and manages most aspects of their life. In turn, human interaction increasingly shapes the behavior of computing systems. As a result, our systems become more complex and, therefore, more difficult to engineer and understand. We need to be able to manage this complexity so that our systems remain reliable, trustable, and performant.

ICPE brings together researchers and practitioners to report on open problems, state-of-the-art solutions, and in-progress research in performance engineering of software and systems - targeting performance and associated quality attributes such as efficiency and reliability in all phases of the computing system lifecycle, from specification and development to run time and maintenance.

ICPE deals with performance and associated quality attributes across any and all application domains. Here is a list of examples:

  • cyber-physical domain, IoT, industrial internet
  • communication networks, wireless and mobile
  • peer-to-peer environments, ad-hoc networks
  • SOA, microservices, web-based environments
  • big data systems, stream and graph processing
  • data-intensive systems, data analytics and data science
  • machine learning and artificial intelligence
  • HPC systems, cloud, edge, grid and fog
  • multimedia systems and applications
  • autonomous, resilient, adaptive and agentic systems and applications

Types of Submissions

ICPE caters to a wide range of submission types with eight distinct submission tracks:

  • Research track for novel research on the conference topics
  • Industry track for research involving industry
  • Journal-first track for contributions from recent journal publications
  • Artifact track for sharing software and data artifacts
  • Emerging research track for discussing preliminary or vision contributions
  • Poster and demo track for short interactive contributions
  • Tutorials track for presentations by leading scientists and practitioners
  • Workshops track for specific aspects of performance engineering
  • Data challenge track for addressing the challenges presented by a performance dataset

Topics of interest

Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

Measurement and Empirical Evaluation

  • data collection techniques, simulation, measurement, instrumentation, profiling
  • controlled experiment design, data driven experiments, diagnostics
  • data management and interchange, tool interoperability
  • statistical analysis, exploration, visualization, visual data mining
  • measuring and evaluating
    • performance and related attributes such as energy efficiency, stability or resource usage
    • dependability and related attributes such as security, resiliency or confidentiality
    • algorithmic attributes such as learning efficiency or solution quality

Modeling

  • approaches and metrics for describing performance and related quality attributes
  • modeling languages and formalisms, modeling methods and tools
  • explanatory and predictive models, online models
  • model learning and extraction techniques
  • model validation and calibration
  • workload characterization

Design and Development Processes

  • requirements engineering, agile and experiment driven techniques, devops
  • performance-oriented design, software architectures, performance patterns and antipatterns
  • performance testing, root cause and bottleneck identification
  • humans in the loop, ethical concerns

Managing Systems at Runtime

  • adaptive systems, monitoring, autotuning, elasticity and autoscaling, power management
  • virtualization and consolidation, resource scheduling, capacity management
  • anomaly detection, service level (definition and monitoring)

Platform-Related Optimizations

  • parallel programming, multi-core and many-core systems
  • compiler optimizations, managed languages and runtime optimization
  • performance and efficiency of hardware accelerators and novel memory systems

Benchmarking

  • design and standardization process
  • benchmark suites, investigative benchmarks
  • benchmark synthesis, benchmark workload generation
  • benchmarking energy efficiency, resilience, stability, security and related quality metrics

Important Note: Open Access Publishing

Starting 2026, all articles published by ACM – including all papers published in the ICPE 2026 proceedings – will be made Open Access (freely available on the public internet). This is greatly beneficial to the advancement of computer science and leads to increased usage and citation of research.

However, this may involve the payment of Article Processing Charges (APC) by the authors of ICPE 2026 accepted papers, subject to the following rules:

1. APC Waiver (ACM Open): Most authors will be covered by ACM Open agreements between their institution and ACM. A paper will be published free of charge if its corresponding author (who does not need to be the first author of the paper) is affiliated with a participating institution.

2. Geographic Waivers & Discounts: Papers whose authors are not covered by ACM Open agreements may qualify for several automated and discretionary Geographic APC Waivers and Discounts offered by ACM, typically based on the corresponding author’s affiliation with an institution in a low-income or lower-middle-income country.

3. Automatic Waivers (Short Papers): Short workshop papers (5 pages and under, plus references) and NIER papers will be published free of charge.

4. Subsidized APC (Full Papers): For ICPE 2026 papers that do not qualify for any of the waivers above, a subsidized APC will be payable:

  • $250 (US dollars) when at least one of the named co-authors is an ACM or ACM Special Interest Group (SIG) member.
  • $350 (US dollars) when none of the named co-authors is an ACM or SIG Member.

This fee is payable when the camera-ready version of the accepted paper is uploaded.