# Ppopp Review Process > Use when reasoning about how a PPoPP submission is evaluated, covering double-blind review, the Program Committee plus External/Extended Review Committee model, TPMS reviewer matching, the author-response rebuttal, the accept/reject decision with automatic poster consideration, and how PPoPP's process differs from PLDI's and CGO's. - Skill: `thedixitjain/ppopp-review-process` (Agent Skill) - Install (CLI): `npx skillmds add thedixitjain/ppopp-review-process` - Raw SKILL.md: https://api.skillmd.com/api/skills/thedixitjain/ppopp-review-process/raw - Safety review: pending - Works with: Claude Code, Claude.ai, OpenAI Codex - Category: Design & Media - Author: thedixitjain (https://skillmd.com/u/thedixitjain) - Updated: 2026-09-08 - Page: https://skillmd.com/skills/thedixitjain/ppopp-review-process --- # PPoPP Review Process Model the pipeline before interpreting any single review. PPoPP runs a **single-round, double-blind conference review** with a **scheduled author-response rebuttal** and an unusual safety net: papers not accepted for a talk are **automatically considered for posters**. The most consequential mental shift for authors arriving from a journal-style venue is that there is (as verified) no guaranteed revise-and-resubmit round — the rebuttal is your one written turn, so it must land. ## Process model - Submission and review run on **HotCRP** with **double-blind** anonymity: author identities are hidden from reviewers and reviewer identities from authors. - Papers are read by the **Program Committee** and an **External/Extended Review Committee (ERC)**; declare conflicts against **both** pools. Reviewer assignment may use the **Toronto Paper Matching System (TPMS)**, so your abstract and topic tags shape who reads you. - After the initial reviews there is a fixed **author-response period** (PPoPP 2026: 27–29 October 2025). Authors respond within a word cap; reviewers then discuss and decide. - The primary decision is **accept / reject** for a regular presentation. Whether an explicit intermediate **"Revision"** category is offered in a given cycle is 待核实 — do not assume it. - **Automatic poster consideration:** submissions not accepted for a talk are automatically considered for the poster track, with a **two-page summary in the proceedings**. ## What PPoPP reviewers weigh | Axis | What they check | Common failure | |---|---|---| | Parallelism as the contribution | Is the concurrency/parallel-performance the point? | A compiler/theory result wearing a parallel costume (a CGO/POPL reroute) | | Correctness under concurrency | Races, linearizability/progress, the memory model | "It passed my tests" with no argument about interleavings | | Scalability | Speedup curves, core sweeps, NUMA/GPU, saturation | One thread count; a win that vanishes on another topology | | Baseline honesty | Comparison to the strongest real competitor | Beating a strawman or the authors' own unoptimized code | | Measurement rigor | Variance, warm-up, pinning, repeated runs | A single-run bar chart with no error bars | | Reproducibility | Enough to re-run; an artifact | Hardware and topology unstated | ## Reading a decision | Decision | What it means | Author move | |---|---|---| | Accept (talk) | Contribution and evidence hold | Camera-ready + artifact; do not reopen scope | | Poster (auto-considered) | The idea is of interest but not a full talk this cycle | Decide in advance whether the 2-page proceedings summary is worth it | | Reject | Structural: wrong scope, weak baseline, no scaling story | Reframe or reroute (CGO/PLDI/ASPLOS/SC or a later round) | | "Revision" (if offered — 待核实) | Repairable gaps within a bounded window | Treat as an R&R; make or explicitly decline every request with evidence | The strategic reading: because there is (as verified) one written turn, design the submission so its weakest point is **answerable in the rebuttal with a number you already have** (a pre-run baseline, an extra core-count) rather than something requiring a month of new machine time. ## How PPoPP differs from its siblings - **vs. PLDI/CGO:** those judge a language/compiler contribution; PPoPP judges the parallel-program behavior. A great pass with a thin scaling story fails here and would pass there. Different template too (PPoPP two-column `acmart` `sigplan`, 10 pages). - **vs. POPL:** POPL rewards the concurrency *proof* itself; PPoPP wants the proof *plus* a measured parallel system. A pure logic is a POPL paper. - **vs. ASPLOS/HPCA:** those own the machine; a PPoPP reviewer reads your hardware as the platform, not the result, and will discount a win that is really a microarchitecture artifact. ## Where author leverage actually exists ```text [Before submission] abstract + topic tags -> TPMS/PC matching (largest early lever) [Initial reviews] factual corrections, a pre-run number, a clarified interleaving argument [Rebuttal] the decisive turn: answer "does it scale?" and "baseline X?" with data already in hand, within the word cap [After reject] no appeal; reroute to a co-located sibling or the next round ``` A rebuttal moves borderline papers when it supplies a scaling point or a baseline a reviewer said was missing; it does not move papers when it argues taste or promises future experiments. The classic PPoPP loss is a reviewer asking "how does this behave at 128 cores / on a second GPU?" and the authors having only the one machine's numbers. ## Reading a review packet Weight reviews before answering. A review that cites your speedup figure, your baseline choice, and your correctness argument was read closely; answer each reviewer on the axis they raised — correctness reviewers with an interleaving argument, performance reviewers with a number. A review that only questions novelty has left soundness to the others; do not spend your word budget there. ## Misreadings to avoid - **Assuming a revise-and-resubmit safety net** — as verified there is one written turn; the rebuttal is not a placeholder. - **Treating the poster path as failure** — the two-page proceedings summary is a real, citable outcome; decide about it deliberately. - **Ignoring the ERC** — external reviewers carry real weight and real conflicts. - **Projecting last year's cadence** — round count, rebuttal timing, and any "Revision" category are decided per edition. ## Output format ```text [Process stage] pre-submission / awaiting reviews / rebuttal / decided [Decision] accept / poster / reject / revision(if offered), with the driving criterion [Criterion map] each review point -> parallelism-as-point | correctness | scalability | baseline | measurement | reproducibility [Leverage plan] the rebuttal number or correction that can actually change the outcome [Forbidden moves] identity leak / promised-but-unrun experiments / arguing taste ``` --- **Source:** [`brycewang-stanford/Awesome-Journal-Skills`](https://github.com/brycewang-stanford/Awesome-Journal-Skills) → `PPoPP-Skills/skills/ppopp-review-process/SKILL.md`