brycewang-stanford 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-readyandmicro-artifact-evaluationas parallel tracks converging on September 11; book Athens logistics once attendance rules are confirmed (待核实 onmicro59/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-selectionrouting 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-stylechecklist) 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>