Socc workflow

SoCC Workflow

Use this as the project-management skill for a SoCC submission. Replace every date with the current official timetable and work backwards from the round's abstract-registration cutoff — which precedes the paper deadline by about a week. SoCC — the ACM Symposium on Cloud Computing, jointly sponsored by SIGMOD and SIGOPS — runs two review rounds per year, so the first planning decision is which round you are genuinely ready for.

SoCC is a conference with no standing editor-in-chief; its rotating leadership is the per-edition General Chair(s) and Program Committee Co-Chairs appointed under SIGMOD and SIGOPS (SoCC 2026 PC Co-Chairs reported as Eric Lo and Ivan Beschastnikh, verified 2026-07-09 via committee-page rendering; confirm on the live page). The cost model is conference registration; at least one author presents.

Milestones

• Venue fit: confirm SoCC over OSDI/NSDI/EuroSys/ATC and over SIGMOD/VLDB (socc-topic-selection), and confirm the contribution spans the systems-and-data intersection.
• Evidence lock: freeze the system/mechanism, the testbed or trace, the workloads, the baselines, and the measurement pipeline.
• Round choice: pick Round 1 or Round 2 knowing a Round-1 reject cannot be resubmitted to Round 2 the same year.
• Abstract registration: submit real title, abstract, authors, subject tags, and conflicts by the round's abstract cutoff.
• Submission: upload the anonymized acmart PDF and (where possible) the artifact link by the round's paper deadline (AoE).
• Rebuttal: during the round's author-response window, answer reviewers on the axes they raised.
• Notification: accept / reject for that round; archive reviews, rebuttal, and every version.
• Acceptance: prepare the camera-ready, pursue ACM artifact badges if the edition offers evaluation, register, and present in Singapore (SoCC 2026).

Backward plan from a round's paper deadline

Weeks out (heuristic)	Cloud-systems milestone
10+	System/mechanism feature-frozen; testbed or trace and baselines chosen
8	Experiments running; measurement harness logs throughput, latency, tail, and cost
6	Analysis done; cost-latency and tail results computed; baselines tuned with a documented budget
4	Full draft in acmart sigconf; artifact (trace-replay/testbed scripts) assembled and anonymized
3	Internal mock review by a systems reader and a data/measurement reader
2	Tail and cost results hardened; related-work delta sharpened; 12-page budget met
1	Dual-anonymous sweep on PDF and artifact (traces, cluster names, system names)
0	Abstract registered by its earlier cutoff, then paper + artifact link on HotCRP

These offsets are planning heuristics only — anchor every one to the current Important Dates / HotCRP deadlines page, never to a previous cycle's calendar.

Two-rounds-per-year: the honest calendar reality

SoCC's twin-round model is a genuine advantage and a trap:

• Advantage: there are two shots per calendar year at the same venue (a winter/February round and a summer/July round for SoCC 2026), so a paper that misses one round is only months from the next.
• Trap: a paper rejected in Round 1 may not be resubmitted to Round 2 the same year, so a rushed Round-1 submission does not buy a discounted retry — it costs you the year at SoCC. Submit to the round you can make strong, not merely the nearer one.
• As of 2026-07-09, the live target is SoCC 2026 Round 2 (paper 14 Jul 2026); Round 1 (13 Feb 2026) has passed.

Failure modes by stage

• Evidence still moving at week 4 forces last-minute measurement nobody has audited — the classic soundness reject for a systems paper.
• Simulation-only at submission invites the "does it hold on a real testbed?" reject from both sponsoring communities.
• Reporting only the mean — omitting tail latency and cost — reads as not understanding what a cloud paper is judged on.
• Leaving the anonymized trace/artifact to the final week is how a cluster name or provider hint leaks identity under dual-anonymous review.
• Treating Round 1 as a free draft and getting rejected forfeits the whole SoCC year.

Coordination notes

• Assign one owner for the measurement harness and reproducibility package and another for the dual-anonymous sweep; shared ownership is how both slip.
• Archive the exact submitted PDF and artifact — the rebuttal must quote the paper precisely and stay anonymous.

Output format

[Current stage] idea / evidence / round-choice / submitted / rebuttal / accepted
[Target round] round 1 / round 2, with the next official deadline and source
[Critical path] <three tasks that determine readiness>
[Risk register] <page budget / anonymity / simulation-vs-testbed / tail+cost evidence / artifact>
[Owner map] <task -> person or role>