Socc submission

SoCC Submission

Run this audit before uploading to the SoCC HotCRP site (socc26.hotcrp.com for the 2026 cycle). SoCC — the ACM Symposium on Cloud Computing — is the only venue jointly sponsored by SIGMOD and SIGOPS, so your paper is read by both systems and data-management reviewers and must satisfy both. Every number below was read from the SoCC 2026/2025 calls on 2026-07-09 via search renderings of the acmsocc.org URLs (see resources/official-source-map.md); treat them as a one-cycle snapshot and reopen the live call first.

The two-round calendar (the distinctive SoCC deadline)

SoCC runs two review rounds per year, each with its own abstract, submission, author-response, and notification dates. For SoCC 2026:

• Round 1: abstract 6 Feb 2026, paper 13 Feb 2026, response 12-14 Apr 2026, notify 29 Apr 2026.
• Round 2: abstract 7 Jul 2026, paper 14 Jul 2026 (AoE), response 10-12 Sep 2026, notify 26 Sep 2026.

Two consequences to internalize:

• Abstract registration precedes the paper by ~a week within the round. Register the real title and abstract; the abstract drives reviewer bidding.
• A Round-1 reject cannot be resubmitted to Round 2 of the same year. Choose the round you are genuinely ready for — a rushed Round-1 submission does not buy a cheap second attempt months later. Verify the exact dates and the no-resubmission rule on the live HotCRP deadlines page.

Format and page budget

• ACM Primary Article Template, sigconf proceedings format, submitted anonymized: \documentclass[sigconf, anonymous]{acmart}, 9pt. This is the ACM acmart path — not the USENIX template that OSDI/NSDI/ATC use. Do not carry a USENIX-format habit across.
• Page budget (verify per cycle): full research papers 12 pages for all text and figures, plus unlimited references; short research papers 6 pages plus unlimited references. The unlimited-reference allowance is generous — but everything a reviewer must read to judge the paper lives in the 12 (or 6) pages, not in an appendix.
• Single PDF, US-Letter, ≤10 MB. Margins, font, and spacing are fixed by acmart; recover space by editing, not by tampering with the template.

Dual-anonymous sweep

SoCC review is dual-anonymous: reviewers do not see authors and authors do not see reviewers. Because cloud-systems papers lean on deployments, traces, and named infrastructure, the leak surface is wide:

# Mechanical pass on the submission PDF and any released artifact archive
pdfinfo paper.pdf | grep -Ei 'author|creator|producer'
pdftotext paper.pdf - | grep -nEi 'github\.com/[a-z0-9-]+|zenodo\.org/record|our (cluster|company|team|deployment)|acknowledg|grant' | head
unzip -l artifact.zip | grep -Ei '\.git/|\.DS_Store|/home/|/Users/|internal' | head

The SoCC-specific leaks: a cluster or datacenter name, a cloud provider or product hint that only your team runs, a trace named after your organization, a system named after your lab, and a data-availability link pointing at a personal or corporate repository. Anonymize traces and re-host artifacts behind an anonymizing service before upload.

Reproducibility posture at submission time

SoCC is a systems-and-data venue; reviewers expect an inspectable evidence trail:

• Describe the testbed / cluster, the workloads or traces, and the measurement scripts that produce the paper's figures — enough that a reviewer believes the numbers are reproducible.
• Provide an anonymized artifact link or archived supplement where possible; released code, workload generators, and traces strengthen both the systems and the data reading of the paper.
• If a production trace or deployment cannot be shared (confidentiality), say so and why, and give what can be shared (a synthetic generator, aggregate statistics).

Desk-risk triage

Finding at audit time	Severity	Real fix
Main text over the 12/6-page budget	Desk-reject-grade	Cut or compress; unlimited references do not absorb body text
Wrong template (USENIX habit) or altered acmart	Named desk-reject ground	Recompile clean in acmart sigconf 9pt
Identity leak in PDF, trace name, cluster, or system name	Anonymity violation	Re-anonymize and re-host; scrub PDF metadata
Abstract not registered by the round's earlier date	No submission slot exists	Nothing fixes this post-AoE — calendar it now
Round-1 reject reused in Round 2	Policy violation	Not allowed same year; reroute or wait a full cycle
Same work under review elsewhere	Dual-submission exposure	Withdraw one venue; verify the current concurrent-submission wording

Final-week order of operations

1. Freeze the system and the measurements early; text can churn, the numbers cannot.
2. Register title/abstract/authors/conflicts before the round's abstract cutoff.
3. Assemble the anonymized artifact (trace-replay harness, testbed scripts) and place its link in the paper.
4. Run the mechanical anonymity checks on the final PDF and the final archive, not drafts.
5. Fill every HotCRP field — subject tags matching both the systems and data facets, conflicts for every coauthor's institution and recent collaborators — a day early.
6. Re-download the uploaded PDF and read it cold to confirm it is the file you meant.

Reverify each cycle

• The number of rounds, both rounds' dates, AoE cutoffs, and the no-cross-round-resubmission rule.
• The page budget and which acmart revision / font size is required.
• Rebuttal format, artifact-track existence and timing, dual-submission wording, and any AI-disclosure rule — all cycle-volatile; none should be assumed stable.

Output format

[SoCC submission status] ready / blocked / needs work
[Round] round 1 / round 2; abstract + paper registered by the round's cutoffs? yes/no
[Format] pages used (body only), acmart sigconf 9pt compliance
[Anonymity] clean / leaks: <where: trace/cluster/system/link>
[Reproducibility] testbed + workloads described? artifact link present?
[Fix queue] <ordered, with owners and dates before the AoE cutoff>