socc-workflow

SoCC Workflow

Use this as the project-management skill for a SoCC submission. Replace every date with the current

official timetable and work backwards from the round's abstract-registration cutoff — which

precedes the paper deadline by about a week. SoCC — the ACM Symposium on Cloud Computing, jointly

sponsored by SIGMOD and SIGOPS — runs two review rounds per year, so the first planning

decision is which round you are genuinely ready for.

SoCC is a conference with no standing editor-in-chief; its rotating leadership is the

per-edition General Chair(s) and Program Committee Co-Chairs appointed under SIGMOD and

SIGOPS (SoCC 2026 PC Co-Chairs reported as Eric Lo and Ivan Beschastnikh, verified 2026-07-09 via

committee-page rendering; confirm on the live page). The cost model is conference registration; at

least one author presents.

Milestones

• Venue fit: confirm SoCC over OSDI/NSDI/EuroSys/ATC and over SIGMOD/VLDB

(socc-topic-selection), and confirm the contribution spans the systems-and-data intersection.

• Evidence lock: freeze the system/mechanism, the testbed or trace, the workloads, the

baselines, and the measurement pipeline.

• Round choice: pick Round 1 or Round 2 knowing a Round-1 reject cannot be resubmitted to

Round 2 the same year.

• Abstract registration: submit real title, abstract, authors, subject tags, and conflicts by

the round's abstract cutoff.

• Submission: upload the anonymized acmart PDF and (where possible) the artifact link by the

round's paper deadline (AoE).

• Rebuttal: during the round's author-response window, answer reviewers on the axes they raised.
• Notification: accept / reject for that round; archive reviews, rebuttal, and every version.
• Acceptance: prepare the camera-ready, pursue ACM artifact badges if the edition offers

evaluation, register, and present in Singapore (SoCC 2026).

Backward plan from a round's paper deadline

| Weeks out (heuristic) | Cloud-systems milestone |

|---|---|

| 10+ | System/mechanism feature-frozen; testbed or trace and baselines chosen |

| 8 | Experiments running; measurement harness logs throughput, latency, tail, and cost |

| 6 | Analysis done; cost-latency and tail results computed; baselines tuned with a documented budget |

| 4 | Full draft in acmart sigconf; artifact (trace-replay/testbed scripts) assembled and anonymized |

| 3 | Internal mock review by a systems reader and a data/measurement reader |

| 2 | Tail and cost results hardened; related-work delta sharpened; 12-page budget met |

| 1 | Dual-anonymous sweep on PDF and artifact (traces, cluster names, system names) |

| 0 | Abstract registered by its earlier cutoff, then paper + artifact link on HotCRP |

These offsets are planning heuristics only — anchor every one to the current Important Dates /

HotCRP deadlines page, never to a previous cycle's calendar.

Two-rounds-per-year: the honest calendar reality

SoCC's twin-round model is a genuine advantage and a trap:

• Advantage: there are two shots per calendar year at the same venue (a winter/February

round and a summer/July round for SoCC 2026), so a paper that misses one round is only months

from the next.

• Trap: a paper rejected in Round 1 may not be resubmitted to Round 2 the same year, so a

rushed Round-1 submission does not buy a discounted retry — it costs you the year at SoCC. Submit

to the round you can make strong, not merely the nearer one.

• As of 2026-07-09, the live target is SoCC 2026 Round 2 (paper 14 Jul 2026); Round 1 (13 Feb

1. has passed.

Failure modes by stage

• Evidence still moving at week 4 forces last-minute measurement nobody has audited — the

classic soundness reject for a systems paper.

• Simulation-only at submission invites the "does it hold on a real testbed?" reject from both

sponsoring communities.

• Reporting only the mean — omitting tail latency and cost — reads as not understanding what a

cloud paper is judged on.

• Leaving the anonymized trace/artifact to the final week is how a cluster name or provider

hint leaks identity under dual-anonymous review.

• Treating Round 1 as a free draft and getting rejected forfeits the whole SoCC year.

Coordination notes

• Assign one owner for the measurement harness and reproducibility package and another for the

dual-anonymous sweep; shared ownership is how both slip.

• Archive the exact submitted PDF and artifact — the rebuttal must quote the paper precisely and

stay anonymous.

Output format

[Current stage] idea / evidence / round-choice / submitted / rebuttal / accepted
[Target round] round 1 / round 2, with the next official deadline and source
[Critical path] <three tasks that determine readiness>
[Risk register] <page budget / anonymity / simulation-vs-testbed / tail+cost evidence / artifact>
[Owner map] <task -> person or role>