| 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.
target: ISCA 2027
gate:
abstract: TBD-2026-11
paper: TBD-2026-11
source: "not yet posted as of 2026-07-08"
owners:
claim_and_story: <name>
simulation_infra: <name>
baselines: <name>
writing: <name>
submission_admin: <name>
rebuttal_reserve: <name>
checks:
- abstract written for reviewer bidding, not filler
- artifact snapshot tagged at submission commit
- mock-PC read
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.
