--- name: isca-workflow description: Use when planning a full ISCA campaign on a calendar — working back from the expected mid-November abstract and paper deadlines to freeze simulation evidence in time, staffing the winter two-round review wait, preparing for the February-March rebuttal and revision window, and branching to camera-ready, artifacts, and the June conference. --- # ISCA Workflow An ISCA year has one gate. Miss mid-November and the next identical opportunity is twelve months away, which is why experienced groups treat the ISCA calendar as an engineering schedule with the deadline as tape-out. This skill lays out that schedule using the verified ISCA 2026 dates as the template; as of 2026-07-08 the ISCA 2027 CFP was not yet posted, so every 2027 date below is an expectation to confirm against `iscaconf.org/isca2027/` the moment it exists (待核实). ## The verified 2026-cycle skeleton | Milestone | ISCA 2026 date (verified) | What it means operationally | |---|---|---| | Abstract registration | November 10, 2025 | Title, abstract, authors, conflicts locked in HotCRP; paper content still fluid | | Full paper | November 17, 2025 | The reviewed PDF — one week after abstracts, so the abstract week is a writing week, not a buffer | | Round 1 reviews due | December 19, 2025 | First reviewer wave completes before the holidays | | Round 2 reviews due | February 13, 2026 | Additional reviews on papers that advanced | | Rebuttal + revision | February 16 - March 6, 2026 | Authors see reviews, respond, and may revise — a three-week working window | | Conference | June 27 - July 1, 2026 (Raleigh, NC) | Presentation; artifact badges resolved before publication | Industry-track submissions ran about a month behind (abstracts December 5, papers December 12, 2025). Final notification date for 2026 was not captured in this pack's verification — 待核实. ## Working backward from November Count in weeks from the expected paper deadline (call it P, likely mid-November 2026 for ISCA 2027): - **P minus 16 weeks (late July):** venue decision final (`isca-topic-selection`); simulation or prototype infrastructure chosen and validated (`isca-experiments`); the one-sentence claim written on the whiteboard. - **P minus 10 weeks:** baseline configurations frozen and reproduced from scratch by a second person. Baseline drift discovered later invalidates every downstream number. - **P minus 6 weeks:** main-result experiments complete. From here, compute goes to sensitivity studies and reviewer-anticipation runs, not to the headline. - **P minus 4 weeks:** full draft exists — bad prose, complete structure. Internal "mock PC" read by two colleagues who did not build the system. - **P minus 1 week (abstract deadline):** title/abstract/topics/conflicts final in HotCRP. The abstract steers reviewer assignment; write it for bidding, not as a placeholder. - **P:** upload per `isca-submission`, then freeze the artifact snapshot that matches the submitted numbers (`isca-reproducibility`). ## The winter: silence, then three loud weeks Between November and mid-February the authors' only jobs are (a) keep the evaluation environment resurrectable and (b) pre-build rebuttal ammunition: the five most likely objections, each with a ready experiment or a pointer into the submitted PDF. The 2026 cycle then opened a combined **rebuttal/revision period** (February 16 - March 6) — unusually long by conference standards precisely because ISCA lets authors *change the paper*, not just argue about it. Staff those three weeks like a sprint: compute reserved, coauthors on call, no conference travel booked. Details of what to do inside the window live in `isca-author-response`. ## Branch plans after notification - **Accept:** camera-ready under the edition's publisher workflow (`isca-camera-ready`), voluntary artifact submission (`isca-artifact-evaluation`), talk and travel for late June. - **Reject with salvageable reviews:** map every misunderstanding to the sentence that permitted it; decide MICRO (spring gate) vs HPCA (summer gate) within two weeks while the reviews are fresh. - **Reject with a fit objection:** rerun `isca-topic-selection` honestly — the committee may have told you the paper's true venue. ## Team ledger Keep a single tracking file in the paper repo; every risk has one owner. ```yaml # isca-campaign.yaml target: ISCA 2027 # 54th by arithmetic - ordinal 待核实 gate: abstract: TBD-2026-11 # confirm on iscaconf.org/isca2027 when live paper: TBD-2026-11 source: "not yet posted as of 2026-07-08" owners: claim_and_story: # one sentence, defended weekly simulation_infra: # versions pinned, configs archived baselines: # frozen P-10w, independently reproduced writing: # draft complete P-4w submission_admin: # HotCRP, conflicts, template, metadata rebuttal_reserve: # compute + calendar hold, mid-Feb to early Mar checks: - abstract written for reviewer bidding, not filler - artifact snapshot tagged at submission commit - mock-PC read completed and objections filed - fallback venue named with trigger condition ``` ## Failure modes this calendar prevents - **The November collision:** abstract and paper a week apart means groups that planned "we'll write after the abstract" write the whole paper in seven days. The P-4w draft rule exists for this. - **The dead environment:** rebuttal-window experiments that fail because the simulator tree no longer builds in February. Tag and containerize at submission. - **The unstaffed revision:** ISCA's revision option is leverage only for teams that can produce new results in days; treat the window as scheduled work. - **The stale retarget:** rejected papers resubmitted unchanged to MICRO carry their ISCA reviews' fingerprints; committees overlap. Budget a real revision. ## Milestone-to-skill routing | When you are at... | Open... | |---|---| | Venue decision (P-16w) | `isca-topic-selection`, exemplars library | | Infrastructure setup | `isca-experiments`, `isca-reproducibility` | | Drafting (P-6w to P-1w) | `isca-writing-style`, `isca-related-work`, `isca-supplementary` | | Upload week | `isca-submission` (twice: abstract step, paper step) | | Winter wait | `isca-review-process` | | February window | `isca-author-response` | | Post-decision | `isca-camera-ready`, `isca-artifact-evaluation`, or the retarget branch | All dates above are the 2026-cycle record (`../../resources/official-source-map.md`, checked 2026-07-08). Confirm the 2027 calendar, page rules, and review mechanics on the official site before acting on any of them.