isca-experiments
Use when designing or auditing the evaluation of an ISCA paper — pinning simulator fidelity to the claims it must carry, documenting gem5-class configurations and sampling choices, selecting workload suites that represent the claim's domain, tuning baselines in good faith, and separating architectural effect from modeling artifact.
Profile →npx skills add brycewang-stanford/Awesome-Journal-Skills --skill isca-experiments --agent claude-code
Same command for any agent — swap --agent for codex, cursor, copilot.
Weekly change comes from our own snapshots, not the repository page — it measures attention, not adoption.
# ISCA Experiments Most ISCA evaluations run on models of machines rather than machines, so the evaluation section is really two nested arguments: that the *modeled* effect is real, and that the *model* deserves trust for this effect. Reviewers at this venue are professionally skeptical about the second argument, and papers die on it more often than on the first. Everything below serves one rule: **the paper must state what its numbers are made of.** ## Declare the methodology contract Early in the methodology section, answer four questions explicitly — this is the contract reviewers try to reconstruct when authors omit it: 1. **Tool and version.** Which simulator/emulator/RTL flow, at which exact version or commit, with which local modifications? "gem5" without a commit is not a methodology; behavior differs meaningfully across releases and forks. 2. **Fidelity scope.** Which parts of the machine are modeled cycle-by-cycle, which are stylized (fixed-latency, functional-only), and which are absent (typical gaps: OS effects, TLB behavior, DRAM refresh, on-chip network contention)? A claim must not rest on a component in the stylized list. 3. **Simulation regions.** Full workloads, c
- Declare the methodology contract
- Match each claim to an instrument that can carry it
- Workloads argue representativeness, not volume
- Baselines: configure the adversary to win
- Attribution and sensitivity
- A config manifest per reported number
- Evaluation-section order that answers reviewers in sequence
- Red flags this venue's reviewers name in reviews
What does the isca-experiments skill do?
Use when designing or auditing the evaluation of an ISCA paper — pinning simulator fidelity to the claims it must carry, documenting gem5-class configurations and sampling choices, selecting workload suites that represent the claim's domain, tuning baselines in good faith, and separating architectural effect from modeling artifact.
How do I install it?
Run `npx skills add brycewang-stanford/Awesome-Journal-Skills --skill isca-experiments --agent claude-code` — it drops the skill into your project so the agent can pick it up. Swap the --agent value for codex, cursor or copilot if you use one of those.
Where does this skill come from?
From brycewang-stanford/Awesome-Journal-Skills, a repository with 984 stars. We read it straight from the repository tree rather than a submitted listing, so what you see here is what is actually published.
Is a popular skill a good skill?
Not necessarily. Stars measure attention, not adoption — a repository can trend for a week and be abandoned. That is why we show the weekly change from our own snapshots next to the total, instead of a single flattering number.