Papers

What is A Paper?

The SC Papers program is the leading venue for presenting high-quality original research, groundbreaking ideas, and compelling insights on future trends in high performance computing, networking, storage, and analysis. Technical papers are peer-reviewed and an Artifact Description is mandatory for all papers submitted to SC.

Areas/tracks

Submissions will be considered on any topic related to high performance computing within the areas below. Authors must indicate a primary area from the choices on the submissions form and are strongly encouraged to indicate a secondary area.

preparing your submission

A paper submission has three components: the paper itself, an Artifact Description Appendix (AD), and an Artifact Evaluation Appendix (AE). The Artifact Description Appendix, or explanation of why there is no artifact description, is mandatory. The Artifact Evaluation Appendix is optional.

Eligibility

Papers that have not previously been published in peer-reviewed venues are eligible for submission to SC. For example, papers pre-posted to arXiv, institutional repositories, and personal websites (but no other peer-reviewed venues) remain eligible for SC submission.

Papers that were published in a workshop are eligible if they have been substantially enhanced (i.e., 30% new material).

Paper Format

Submissions will be considered on any topic related to high performance computing within the areas below. Authors must indicate a primary area from the choices on the submissions form and are strongly encouraged to indicate a secondary area.

Small-scale studies – including single-node studies – are welcome as long as the paper clearly conveys the work’s contribution to high performance computing.

conflict of interest

Please be aware of, and adhere to, these SC Conference guidelines regarding potential conflicts of interest and disclosure.

A potential conflict of interest occurs when a person is involved in making a decision that:

• Could result in that person, a close associate of that person, or that person’s company or institution receiving significant financial gain, such as a contract or grant, or
• Could result in that person, or a close associate of that person, receiving significant professional recognition, such as an award or the selection of a paper, work, exhibit, or other type of submitted presentation.

Program Committee members will be given the opportunity to list potential conflicts of interest during each program’s review process. Program Committee chairs and area chairs will make every effort to avoid assignments that have a potential COI.

According to the SC conference you have a conflict of interest with the following:

• Your PhD advisors, post-doctoral advisors, PhD students, and post-doctoral advisees;
• Family relations by blood or marriage, or equivalent (e.g., a partner);
• People with whom you collaborated in the past five years. Collaborators include: co-authors on an accepted/rejected/pending research paper; co-PIs on an accepted/pending grant; those who fund your research; researchers whom you fund; or researchers with whom you are actively collaborating;
• Close personal friends or others with whom you believe a conflict of interest exists;
• People who were employed by, or a student at, your primary institution(s) in the past five years, or people who are active candidates for employment at your primary institution(s).

Note that “service” collaborations, such as writing a DOE, NSF, or DARPA report, or serving on a program committee, or serving on the editorial board of a journal, do not inherently create a COI.

Other situations can create COIs, and you should contact the Technical Program Chairs for questions or clarification on any of these issues.

Plagiarism

Please review the ACM guidelines on identifying plagiarism.

This document aims to help authors, reviewers, and Papers Chairs understand the double-blind review process that the SC Conference Series has adopted. Please contact us with any questions or comments.

Guidance for authors

If you are an author, you should write your paper so as not to disclose your identity or the identities of your co-authors. The following guidelines are best practices for “blinding” a submission in a way that should not weaken it or the presentation of its ideas. These guidelines are broken up into the major submission and review phases: while writing (before submitting), at submission time, and during the rebuttal process.

These practices were distilled from McKinley (2015) and Snodgrass (2007).

While Writing

• Do not use your name or your co-authors’ names, affiliations, funding sources, or acknowledgments in the heading or body of the document. It is absolutely fine and encouraged to use the name of the machine you are working on and describe it.
• Do not eliminate self-references to your published work that are relevant and essential to a proper review of your paper solely in an attempt to anonymize your submission. Instead, write self-references in the third person. Recall that the goal and spirit of double-blind review is to create uncertainty about authorship, which is sufficient to realize most of its benefits.
• To reference your unpublished work, use anonymous citations. From Snodgrass (2007): “The authors developed … [1]” where the reference [1] appears as, “[1] Anonymous (omitted due to double-blind review).” You will have a chance to explain these references to the non-conflicted Papers Chair or their designee(s); see At Submission Time, below. See the FAQ for more examples.

At Submission Time

• At submission time, you will be asked to declare conflicts of interest you may have with program committee members. You will also have the option to upload a list of conflicts. Reviewers will be asked separately to verify declared conflicts.
• Because of the double-blind process, there is no  limit on the number of submissions by reviewers. (Track Co-Chairs are subject to limits.) However, there is a limit of four accepted papers for reviewers.

During the Review Period

You are not forbidden from disseminating your work via talks or technical reports. However, you should not try to directly or otherwise unduly influence program committee members who may be reviewing your paper.

During the Rebuttal Period

During the rebuttal period, authors should still assume double-blind review. Therefore, authors should not disclose their identities in their rebuttal  to the reviewers. However, as with the original submission, authors will have the option of entering identity-revealing information in a separate part of the rebuttal form that will, by default, be visible only to non-conflicted Chairs, or their designee(s) in the case of conflicts.

Guidance for Papers Chairs & Reviewers

The following is a set of guidelines for the Papers Co-Chairs or Area Co-Chairs (hereafter, “Chair”) and reviewers (i.e., Papers Committee members). Generally speaking, the procedures draw inspiration from the three principles suggested by Snodgrass:

“The first is that authors should not be required to go to great lengths to blind their submissions. The second is that comprehensiveness of the review trumps blinding efficacy. The final principle … is that [editors and chairs] retain flexibility and authority in managing the reviewing process.”

Before the Submissions Deadline

• Correctly identifying conflicts of interest (COIs) is one of the most important procedural aspects of double-blind review. Therefore, before the Papers submissions deadline, Chairs and reviewers should log into the review system to verify and upload their conflicts of interest. This process can be time consuming, so please plan accordingly.
• Reviewers will be given a list of submitting authors from all tracks who have indicated they have a conflict with that reviewer. The authors will be listed separately from any potential co-authors. This will enable the reviewer to point out to the Papers chair(s) any declared conflicts that are potentially spurious.
• During paper bidding, reviewers should let their Chair know if they suspect a conflict with a submission and what they believe is the nature of the conflict.

During the Review Period

• A reviewer may accidentally discover the identities of the authors during the review. (For instance, he or she might be checking references to determine the novelty of the submission and discover a technical report with the same content.) In this case, the reviewer should disclose this discovery to their Chair. Such incidents do not necessarily “violate” the double-blind policy, and the reviewer may continue to review the paper. The spirit of double-blind reviewing is that reviewers should not actively try to discover who the authors of a submission are.
• A reviewer who thinks he or she knows an author’s identity should not reveal their suspicion in their review or during discussions with other reviewers .
• SC Papers follows a “double-blind until accept” procedure. That is, author identities remain hidden until the review committee has determined all of the accepted papers. For rejected papers, author identities remain hidden even after rejection.
• Reviewers who feel that knowing an author’s name or affiliations is necessary to review a submission can make their case to their Chair at any time during the review process.
• Reviewers who wish to ask colleagues to help with reviews must clear these requests with the Chair first and take steps to ensure that the colleague understands the double-blind policy. In any case, a reviewer is responsible for representing their reviews fully.

During the Program Committee Meeting

Chairs should observe and manage conflicts as they would in a single-blind review. For instance, they should avoid discussing a paper until all of the paper’s conflicted reviewers have left the room.

REgistration

If your Paper is selected, at least one author must register for the Technical Program in order to attend the SC Conference and present the paper.

For an accepted paper to be included in the proceedings, the author has to present the paper at the conference (in person or virtually).

Proceedings

All accepted papers will be listed in the online SC Schedule.

Papers are archived in the ACM Digital Library and IEEE Xplore; members of SIGHPC or subscribers to the archives may access the full papers without charge. This publication contains the full text of all Papers and their Artifact Description appendices presented at the SC Conference.

schedule & location

Paper presentations will be held Tuesday–Thursday, November 14–16, 2023. Paper sessions are 30 minutes. Day, time, and location for each paper session will be published in the online SC Schedule by September.

infrastructure

Papers are assigned either a classroom or a theater room equipped with standard AV facilities:

• Projector
• Microphone and podium
• Wireless lapel microphone or wireless handheld microphone
• Projection screen

Awards

Best Paper (BP), Best Student Paper (BSP), and Best Reproducibility Advancement (BRA) nominations are made during the review process and are highlighted in the online SC schedule. BP, BSP, and BRA winners are selected by a committee who attends the corresponding paper presentations, and winners are announced at the Thursday Awards ceremony.