micro-workflow

MICRO Workflow

MICRO owns the autumn slot of computer architecture's four-venue year: an early

April deadline feeding an end-of-October symposium. Because the four sibling venues

interleave, a MICRO plan is really a lattice plan — every outcome has a next move

within roughly four months. Dates below verified 2026-07-08; every one is a

single-cycle snapshot.

The 2026 cycle clock (59th edition, Athens)

2026-03-31  abstract registration       11:59 PM EDT   hard gate
2026-04-07  full paper                  11:59 PM EDT   micro2026.hotcrp.com
2026-06-03 → 06-17  rebuttal/revision   two-week window (micro-author-response)
2026-07-07  notification
2026-09-11  camera-ready               (AE runs in parallel; micro-camera-ready)
2026-10-31 → 11-04  symposium, Athens, Greece

As of this pack's check date (2026-07-08), the 2026 cycle had **just issued

decisions** — the live work is camera-ready + AE for accepts, and lattice routing

for rejects. The next MICRO submission opportunity is the 2027 cycle, expected in

the same early-April position (待核实 when microarch.org posts it).

The four-venue calendar from MICRO's seat

| Venue | Deadline (verified for cycle shown) | Conference | Use it when |

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

| MICRO 2026 | Apr 7, 2026 (closed) | Oct 31–Nov 4, 2026, Athens | Mechanism-centric core work |

| HPCA 2027 | July 24, 2026 | March 2027, Salt Lake City | Fastest next slot after a MICRO reject — 17 days after notification |

| ASPLOS 2027 | Sept 9, 2026 (2nd of two; Apr 15 passed) | April 2027, Crete | Reviews said "the interesting part is the software interaction" |

| ISCA 2027 | abstracts Nov 10 / papers Nov 17, 2026 | June 2027, Atlanta | Four months of repair headroom; broadest architecture audience |

| MICRO 2027 | ~April 2027, 待核实 | autumn 2027 | Full-year rework or a new project |

The rhythm to internalize: **architecture deadlines cluster in April

(MICRO, ASPLOS-1st), July (HPCA), September (ASPLOS-2nd), and November (ISCA)** —

one submission window roughly every quarter. A healthy lab pipeline drafts against

the next two windows simultaneously.

Backward plan for a MICRO 2027 submission

Working back from an assumed early-April 2027 deadline (verify the real date):

| When | Milestone | Owner risk |

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

| Aug–Sep 2026 | Mechanism sketch + micro-topic-selection gate; infrastructure choice (simulator, workloads) | Wrong venue discovered late |

| Oct–Nov 2026 | Baseline validated against published configs; characterization study done | Untuned baseline poisons all later data |

| Dec 2026 | Mechanism implemented in simulator; first end-to-end numbers | "It simulates" ≠ "it is modeled correctly" |

| Jan 2027 | Ablations + sensitivity sweeps; power/area modeling attached | Sweeps are compute-bound — queue early |

| Feb 2027 | Full draft; internal red-team review against micro-writing-style | Cost accounting missing |

| Mar 2027 | Freeze evaluation; micro-reproducibility manifests complete; format pass | Late "one more feature" restarts sweeps |

| T-7 days | Abstract registered in HotCRP | Missing the registration gate ends everything |

| T-0 | Upload (EDT arithmetic!) | See micro-submission |

The structural insight: in microarchitecture the **evaluation stack is the

schedule**. Simulator bring-up, trace generation, and multi-week sweep queues

dominate; prose is the cheap part. Any plan that allocates most of its calendar to

writing is mis-costed.

Risk register for the compute-bound schedule

| Risk | Early symptom | Mitigation |

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

| Sweep queue starvation | Cluster contention in Feb–Mar (everyone's MICRO crunch) | Reserve allocation in January; keep key-tier configs that finish overnight |

| Baseline invalidated late | A simulator bugfix changes baseline IPC | Freeze simulator commit by January; batch fixes into one revalidation |

| Trace regeneration cascade | New compiler/flags after traces cut | Version traces; treat regeneration as a one-week line item, not a checkbox |

| Writing squeezed to two weeks | "Evaluation almost done" through February | Draft intro + mechanism sections in parallel with sweeps — they do not depend on final numbers |

| Deadline-week format panic | First full format pass happens at T-2 | Run the micro-submission gate table at T-14 and T-1 |

Standing weekly cadence during a campaign

Mon   queue review: sweeps finished / stalled / mis-configured; ledger updated
Wed   claims meeting: does yesterday's data still support the paper's sentences?
Fri   risk register walk (table above) + one live-page re-verification
      (deadline, CFP, HotCRP) logged with date — rules change between visits

Outcome branches (July 7 has happened)

• Accepted: run micro-camera-ready and micro-artifact-evaluation as

parallel tracks converging on September 11; book Athens logistics once

attendance rules are confirmed (待核实 on micro59/attend/).

• Rejected, methodology wounds: the HPCA July 24 window is realistically only

for papers whose fixes are textual; simulation repairs point at ISCA Nov 17.

• Rejected, "not microarchitectural enough": ASPLOS Sept 9 with a cross-layer

reframe — see micro-topic-selection routing table.

• Any branch: archive reviews, update the results ledger, and file rebuttal

promises as the next version's spec.

Multi-paper pipelines and self-competition

Labs running more than one submission per cycle share one sweep queue and one set

of senior readers — schedule both explicitly:

• Stagger internal red-team reviews (micro-writing-style checklist) so the same

professor is not reading two full drafts in deadline week.

• Deconflict topics in HotCRP if two submissions are adjacent; two papers from

one lab splitting the same reviewer pool can drag each other down in

double-blind bidding without anyone noticing until the reviews land.

• After notification, the lattice branches diverge per paper — keep one shared

calendar of the four venues' gates (table above) so a July HPCA sprint for

paper A does not silently consume the cluster paper B needs for its ISCA

repairs.

Output format

[Today] <date> → position in cycle: <phase>
[Active gate] <next deadline, venue, days remaining, timezone stated>
[Lattice] plan A <venue+date> · plan B <venue+date> · trigger condition between them
[Evaluation-stack status] simulator / baseline / traces / sweeps: ready-blocked each
[Backward plan] next 3 milestones with dates and owners
[待核实] <dates assumed but not yet posted on live pages>