HPCA Workflow

Use this as the project-management skill for an HPCA submission. Replace every date with the current official timetable and plan backward from the late-July gate.

HPCA is a conference, not a journal: it has no standing editor-in-chief and no article-processing charge. It is run by the IEEE-CS Technical Committee on Computer Architecture (TCCA); the rotating leadership is the per-edition General and Program Chairs (HPCA 2027 program chairs were reported as Aamer Jaleel and Mattan Erez — 待核实), and the cost model is registration fees. Chairs rotate yearly, so re-check the current organization page rather than carrying a name forward.

The shape of the HPCA year

HPCA sits in the winter seat: a late-July deadline feeds an autumn review and a February/March conference. It is the last major architecture deadline of the summer, so a project that misses it waits for MICRO's spring gate or ISCA's November gate — plan the fallback before you need it.

Milestones

• Venue fit: confirm a measured microarchitectural cost meets a buildable mechanism whose behavior is the contribution.
• Evidence lock: freeze the mechanism, the simulator/silicon configuration, workloads, sampled regions, baselines, and the artifact mirror.
• Registration step: submit real title, abstract, authors, topics, and complete conflicts about a week before the paper.
• Paper step: upload the anonymous IEEE-template PDF and all HotCRP fields.
• Review wait: triage reviews for correctness, methodology, novelty, and reproducibility concerns as they land.
• Rebuttal/revision window: respond and revise in one combined window (recent cycles run a single window, not two rounds).
• Notification → acceptance: archive reviews, the response, and the submitted versions; then IEEE camera-ready, artifact evaluation on the AE HotCRP, and the winter talk.

Backward plan from the paper deadline

Weeks out (heuristic)	Hardware-evaluated milestone
8+	Mechanism implemented; fidelity contract (tool, config, workloads) fixed
6	Baseline sweeps complete; per-workload results, not just means
4	Real-silicon or validated-simulator numbers logged with machine state
3	Full draft in the IEEE two-column template
2	Internal mock review by an architecture-minded reader
1	Reference author-list check, anonymity sweep, artifact mirror assembled
0	Registration then paper on HotCRP

These offsets are planning heuristics — anchor every one to the current official timetable, never to a previous cycle.

Failure modes by stage

• Infrastructure still churning at week 4 forces last-minute configuration changes no one has validated — the classic HPCA methodology reject in the making.
• Leaving template conversion to the final week surfaces overflow late; two-column architecture figures are tighter than a working draft's.
• Skipping the mock review forfeits the only chance to hear "your baseline is under-tuned" from a friend rather than a reviewer.
• Building the artifact mirror after the deadline under pressure is how anonymity leaks and un-pinned simulators ship.

Coordination notes

• Assign one named owner for the fidelity contract and another for the anonymity sweep; shared ownership is how both slip.
• Archive the exact submitted PDF, the artifact mirror, and the configuration files, since rebuttal replies must quote them precisely.

Output format

[Current stage] idea / evaluation / writing / registration / paper / window / accepted
[Next official deadline] <date and source, or unknown>
[Critical path] <three tasks that determine readiness>
[Risk register] <page/anonymity/instrument/reproducibility/artifact/presentation>
[Fallback venue] <MICRO / ISCA / ASPLOS branch if rejected>
[Owner map] <task -> person or role>