Proceedings of the 44th Annual International Symposium on Computer Architecture

It is an honor to introduce the technical program for the 39th International Symposium on Computer Architecture (ISCA 2012). This symposium is the premier forum for new ideas and results in the area of computer architecture. This year's program includes 47 papers on a broad set of topics, keynotes from Jeff Hawkins (Numenta) and Justin Rattner (Intel), and a set of workshops and tutorials coordinated by Alaa Alameldeen and Benjamin Lee. ISCA 2012 received 262 paper submissions --- the highest number in over twenty years. I assigned each paper to 4 Program Committee (PC) members and 1 senior external reviewer to review. By directly assigning external reviews, I felt I could reduce the load of the PC members (who did not have to solicit or interact with external reviewers) and ensure the highest reviewing standards. Given that I had 50 PC members, each PC member had to review, on average, about 21 papers personally. Overall, I believe that all of the PC members and external reviewers showed a very high degree of professionalism and fairness in their reviews. After all the reviews were collected, a Rebuttal Period allowed the authors to respond to the reviews. Then, PC members read the 5 reviews and the authors' response for the papers they had read, and engaged in a week-long discussion with other PC reviewers of the same paper(s) via email. At the end of this process, each PC member had to explicitly assign a grade to each of the papers she/he had reviewed. The papers' average grade was used to order the discussion of papers at the PC meeting. The whole review process was double blind.