ISCA Skills
A 12-skill depth pack for ISCA, the ACM/IEEE International Symposium on Computer Architecture: venue fit and the architecture-conference calendar, the November abstract+paper gate, simulation-grade evaluation, the two-round review with rebuttal and revision, camera-ready, and ACM-badged artifact evaluation. Grounded in ISCA 2026 official pages checked on 2026-07-08.
Skills in this plugin
11- ▌ Isca Submission · brycewang-stanfordUse when running the final pre-deadline audit of an ISCA submission — the two-step abstract-then-paper gate a week apart, the 11-page text limit with unlimited references, the template check, the double-blind sweep including PDF metadata and anonymized artifact links, and HotCRP form completion before AoE.
- ▌ Isca Experiments · brycewang-stanfordUse when designing or auditing the evaluation of an ISCA paper — pinning simulator fidelity to the claims it must carry, documenting gem5-class configurations and sampling choices, selecting workload suites that represent the claim's domain, tuning baselines in good faith, and separating architectural effect from modeling artifact.
- ▌ Isca Camera Ready · brycewang-stanfordUse when converting an accepted ISCA paper into its published form — de-anonymizing authors, acknowledgments, and artifact links; satisfying the edition's publisher workflow under the alternating ACM/IEEE arrangement; integrating shepherd requirements and badges; and preparing the June talk and attendance logistics.
- ▌ Isca Related Work · brycewang-stanfordUse when positioning an ISCA submission against prior art — covering five decades of architecture literature across ACM DL, IEEE Xplore, and dblp, differentiating by mechanism rather than metric, handling self-citations and arXiv preprints under double-blind rules, and exploiting ISCA's unlimited reference pages.
- ▌ Isca Supplementary · brycewang-stanfordUse when deciding what accompanies an ISCA submission beyond the 11 reviewed pages — what must live inside the page budget because reviewers see nothing else, how to use fully anonymized artifact links under the double-blind rules, staging material for the revision window, and planning post-acceptance release.
- ▌ Isca Writing Style · brycewang-stanfordUse when drafting or revising an ISCA paper's prose — organizing 11 pages around one architectural insight, writing the motivation section from measured data, describing mechanisms at reviewer-checkable precision with figures that carry the design, and keeping quantitative claims calibrated to the instrument behind them.
- ▌ Isca Review Process · brycewang-stanfordUse when reasoning about how an ISCA submission is evaluated — the two-round review structure with December and February reviewer waves, what the combined rebuttal-and-revision window means for decisions, PC-meeting dynamics at a flagship architecture venue, and how to read the eventual outcome.
- ▌ Isca Author Response · brycewang-stanfordUse when ISCA reviews arrive and the rebuttal-plus-revision window opens — triaging objections by what a three-week window can actually fix, deciding between textual rebuttal and a revised PDF with new experiments, structuring responses that arm a champion at the PC meeting, and avoiding window-burning mistakes.
- ▌ Isca Reproducibility · brycewang-stanfordUse when making an ISCA paper's results regenerable — pinning simulator versions and local patches, archiving per-figure configuration manifests, recording workload provenance and sampling seeds, quantifying run-to-run variation on real hardware, and keeping the environment resurrectable through the February window.
- ▌ Isca Topic Selection · brycewang-stanfordUse when deciding whether a project belongs at ISCA, the ACM/IEEE flagship architecture symposium — testing whether the machine itself is the contribution, choosing between ISCA's November gate and the MICRO, HPCA, and ASPLOS seats in the architecture year, and weighing the main track against the industry track.
- ▌ Isca Artifact Evaluation · brycewang-stanfordUse when preparing an accepted ISCA paper's artifact for evaluation under the ACM Review and Badging policy — scoping which results are reproducible within evaluator budgets, packaging simulator-heavy workflows others can run, writing the evaluator-facing appendix, and earning badges that print on the paper.