The computer architecture community is best served when its elected leadership provides strong guidance to and oversight of our flagship conferences. This has long been the case for ACM SIGARCH, which co-sponsors ISCA and ASPLOS, and IEEE TCCA, which (co-)sponsors ISCA and HPCA. In contrast, IEEE TCuARCH has exercised at best weak oversight of the MICRO conference, instead allowing its steering committee to self-appoint new members through an “old boys” process.
You can help fix this by voting in January’s election, but you must be a (non-student) member of IEEE TCuARCH before the election. To ensure your TC membership is valid and up to date, please log in now to your IEEE Web Account and check your membership status: https://www.ieee.org/profile/public/login/publiclogin.html. Non-members can join TCuARCH at: https://www.ieee.org/membership_services/membership/join/index.html?WT.mc_id=hc_join.
If elected Chair of TCuARCH, I pledge to pursue two steps to establish strong oversight and control of the MICRO Steering Committee. First, I will work with (co-sponsor) ACM SIGMICRO to establish a membership formula similar to that used for ISCA, ASPLOS, and other top conferences. Specifically, I will push for all members of the MICRO Steering Committee to be either i) members of the ACM SIGMICRO and TCuARCH Executive Committees, ii) appointees of these same Executive Committees, or iii) the General Chair(s) or Program Chair(s) from recent (e.g., previous two years) MICRO conferences.
Second, I will work with the TCCA Executive Committee and the IEEE Computer Society T&C Activities Board to merge TCuARCH with TCCA. Strong oversight requires strong executive committees. TCuARCH has historically had only an elected Chair. In contrast, TCCA has long had a large and active executive committee (currently 18 members, including a Diversity Chair) to oversee its portfolio of conferences and other activities. Rather than further fragment the computer architecture community’s leadership by creating yet another executive committee, I believe it is more appropriate to merge TCuARCH with TCCA. TCuARCH co-sponsors only three conferences: MICRO (50%), CGO (50%), and ISPASS (33%). In contrast, TCCA already (co-)sponsors 10 conferences, including ISPASS (34%), so merging with TCuARCH would not significantly increase its portfolio.
About the author: Professor David A. Wood is the Sheldon B. Lubar Chair in Computer Sciences at the University of Wisconsin, Madison
Disclaimer: These posts are written by individual contributors to share their thoughts on the Computer Architecture Today blog for the benefit of the community. Any views or opinions represented in this blog are personal, belong solely to the blog author and do not represent those of ACM SIGARCH or its parent organization, ACM.
