Micro workflow

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-ready and micro-artifact-evaluation as parallel tracks converging on September 11; book Athens logistics once attendance rules are confirmed (待核实 on micro59/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-selection routing 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-style checklist) 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>