isca-topic-selection
Use when deciding whether a project belongs at ISCA, the ACM/IEEE flagship architecture symposium — testing whether the machine itself is the contribution, choosing between ISCA's November gate and the MICRO, HPCA, and ASPLOS seats in the architecture year, and weighing the main track against the industry track.
Profile →npx skills add brycewang-stanford/Awesome-Journal-Skills --skill isca-topic-selection --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 Topic Selection ISCA reviews reward papers whose central object is a hardware organization: a pipeline, a cache hierarchy, a memory controller, an accelerator datapath, an interconnect, a coherence or consistency mechanism. Software may motivate the work and co-design may strengthen it, but at ISCA the question a program committee member carries into every discussion is *what does this paper teach us about how to build machines?* Projects that cannot answer that in one sentence tend to be respected and rejected in the same review. ## The center-of-gravity question Write down the single artifact your evaluation section studies hardest. Then ask where its novelty lives: - **In the hardware organization** — a new structure, policy, or datapath whose behavior you measure across workloads. Natural ISCA material. - **In the hardware/software contract** — an ISA extension or OS-visible mechanism where the software side changes too. ISCA takes these, but ASPLOS's reviewer pool is built for them; decide by which half carries the insight. - **In the software layer alone** — a compiler pass, runtime, or scheduler running on unmodified silicon. Reviewers will ask what the architecture l
- The center-of-gravity question
- ISCA's seat in the architecture year
- Main track or industry track
- Fit worksheet
- Shapes with a strong ISCA record
- Anti-fits that waste a cycle
- Decide and record
What does the isca-topic-selection skill do?
Use when deciding whether a project belongs at ISCA, the ACM/IEEE flagship architecture symposium — testing whether the machine itself is the contribution, choosing between ISCA's November gate and the MICRO, HPCA, and ASPLOS seats in the architecture year, and weighing the main track against the industry track.
How do I install it?
Run `npx skills add brycewang-stanford/Awesome-Journal-Skills --skill isca-topic-selection --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.