isca-workflow

ISCA Workflow

An ISCA year has one gate. Miss mid-November and the next identical opportunity is

twelve months away, which is why experienced groups treat the ISCA calendar as an

engineering schedule with the deadline as tape-out. This skill lays out that

schedule using the verified ISCA 2026 dates as the template; as of 2026-07-08 the

ISCA 2027 CFP was not yet posted, so every 2027 date below is an expectation to

confirm against iscaconf.org/isca2027/ the moment it exists (待核实).

The verified 2026-cycle skeleton

| Milestone | ISCA 2026 date (verified) | What it means operationally |

|---|---|---|

| Abstract registration | November 10, 2025 | Title, abstract, authors, conflicts locked in HotCRP; paper content still fluid |

| Full paper | November 17, 2025 | The reviewed PDF — one week after abstracts, so the abstract week is a writing week, not a buffer |

| Round 1 reviews due | December 19, 2025 | First reviewer wave completes before the holidays |

| Round 2 reviews due | February 13, 2026 | Additional reviews on papers that advanced |

| Rebuttal + revision | February 16 - March 6, 2026 | Authors see reviews, respond, and may revise — a three-week working window |

| Conference | June 27 - July 1, 2026 (Raleigh, NC) | Presentation; artifact badges resolved before publication |

Industry-track submissions ran about a month behind (abstracts December 5, papers

December 12, 2025). Final notification date for 2026 was not captured in this

pack's verification — 待核实.

Working backward from November

Count in weeks from the expected paper deadline (call it P, likely mid-November

2026 for ISCA 2027):

• P minus 16 weeks (late July): venue decision final (isca-topic-selection);

simulation or prototype infrastructure chosen and validated

(isca-experiments); the one-sentence claim written on the whiteboard.

• P minus 10 weeks: baseline configurations frozen and reproduced from scratch

by a second person. Baseline drift discovered later invalidates every downstream

number.

• P minus 6 weeks: main-result experiments complete. From here, compute goes to

sensitivity studies and reviewer-anticipation runs, not to the headline.

• P minus 4 weeks: full draft exists — bad prose, complete structure. Internal

"mock PC" read by two colleagues who did not build the system.

• P minus 1 week (abstract deadline): title/abstract/topics/conflicts final in

HotCRP. The abstract steers reviewer assignment; write it for bidding, not as a

placeholder.

• P: upload per isca-submission, then freeze the artifact snapshot that

matches the submitted numbers (isca-reproducibility).

The winter: silence, then three loud weeks

Between November and mid-February the authors' only jobs are (a) keep the

evaluation environment resurrectable and (b) pre-build rebuttal ammunition: the

five most likely objections, each with a ready experiment or a pointer into the

submitted PDF. The 2026 cycle then opened a combined rebuttal/revision period

(February 16 - March 6) — unusually long by conference standards precisely because

ISCA lets authors change the paper, not just argue about it. Staff those three

weeks like a sprint: compute reserved, coauthors on call, no conference travel

booked. Details of what to do inside the window live in isca-author-response.

Branch plans after notification

• Accept: camera-ready under the edition's publisher workflow

(isca-camera-ready), voluntary artifact submission (isca-artifact-evaluation),

talk and travel for late June.

• Reject with salvageable reviews: map every misunderstanding to the sentence

that permitted it; decide MICRO (spring gate) vs HPCA (summer gate) within two

weeks while the reviews are fresh.

• Reject with a fit objection: rerun isca-topic-selection honestly — the

committee may have told you the paper's true venue.

Team ledger

Keep a single tracking file in the paper repo; every risk has one owner.

# isca-campaign.yaml
target: ISCA 2027            # 54th by arithmetic - ordinal 待核实
gate:
  abstract: TBD-2026-11      # confirm on iscaconf.org/isca2027 when live
  paper:    TBD-2026-11
  source:   "not yet posted as of 2026-07-08"
owners:
  claim_and_story:   <name>   # one sentence, defended weekly
  simulation_infra:  <name>   # versions pinned, configs archived
  baselines:         <name>   # frozen P-10w, independently reproduced
  writing:           <name>   # draft complete P-4w
  submission_admin:  <name>   # HotCRP, conflicts, template, metadata
  rebuttal_reserve:  <name>   # compute + calendar hold, mid-Feb to early Mar
checks:
  - abstract written for reviewer bidding, not filler
  - artifact snapshot tagged at submission commit
  - mock-PC read completed and objections filed
  - fallback venue named with trigger condition

Failure modes this calendar prevents

• The November collision: abstract and paper a week apart means groups that

planned "we'll write after the abstract" write the whole paper in seven days.

The P-4w draft rule exists for this.

• The dead environment: rebuttal-window experiments that fail because the

simulator tree no longer builds in February. Tag and containerize at submission.

• The unstaffed revision: ISCA's revision option is leverage only for teams

that can produce new results in days; treat the window as scheduled work.

• The stale retarget: rejected papers resubmitted unchanged to MICRO carry

their ISCA reviews' fingerprints; committees overlap. Budget a real revision.

Milestone-to-skill routing

| When you are at... | Open... |

|---|---|

| Venue decision (P-16w) | isca-topic-selection, exemplars library |

| Infrastructure setup | isca-experiments, isca-reproducibility |

| Drafting (P-6w to P-1w) | isca-writing-style, isca-related-work, isca-supplementary |

| Upload week | isca-submission (twice: abstract step, paper step) |

| Winter wait | isca-review-process |

| February window | isca-author-response |

| Post-decision | isca-camera-ready, isca-artifact-evaluation, or the retarget branch |

All dates above are the 2026-cycle record

(../../resources/official-source-map.md, checked 2026-07-08). Confirm the 2027

calendar, page rules, and review mechanics on the official site before acting on

any of them.