micro-topic-selection
Use when deciding whether a project belongs at MICRO (IEEE/ACM International Symposium on Microarchitecture) or should route to ISCA, HPCA, ASPLOS, DAC/ICCAD, SC, or MLSys — testing whether the mechanism truly lives inside the machine, gauging the MICRO evidence bar, and weighing the main track against the new Industry Track.
Profile →npx skills add brycewang-stanford/Awesome-Journal-Skills --skill micro-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.
# MICRO Topic Selection Decide venue before writing a single evaluation section. MICRO is the flagship symposium *of the microarchitecture community specifically* — the 2026 edition is the 59th, which places its lineage back to the 1968 microprogramming workshops. Reviewers here are calibrated to mechanisms measured in cycles, bytes of state, and milliwatts. ## The mechanism-residency test Ask where the proposed mechanism physically lives and what evidence proves it works: 1. **State the mechanism in one sentence without naming any software component.** If you cannot — if the sentence needs "the compiler", "the OS", or "the runtime" as a load-bearing actor — the work is cross-stack and ASPLOS deserves a look first. 2. **Name the structure it modifies:** fetch/decode/rename stages, branch predictor tables, cache arrays and replacement metadata, prefetch engines, TLBs, memory controller queues, on-chip network routers, accelerator datapaths, or the power-management unit. A nameable structure is a strong MICRO signal. 3. **Name the cost line.** MICRO reviewers expect area (mm² or KB of storage), power, and latency overheads next to the speedup. If the contribution has no hardware cost
- The mechanism-residency test
- Routing table (deadlines verified 2026-07-08; recheck live pages)
- What MICRO itself rewards
- Quick self-interrogation
- Borderline cases, adjudicated
- Cycle awareness
- Output format
What does the micro-topic-selection skill do?
Use when deciding whether a project belongs at MICRO (IEEE/ACM International Symposium on Microarchitecture) or should route to ISCA, HPCA, ASPLOS, DAC/ICCAD, SC, or MLSys — testing whether the mechanism truly lives inside the machine, gauging the MICRO evidence bar, and weighing the main track against the new Industry Track.
How do I install it?
Run `npx skills add brycewang-stanford/Awesome-Journal-Skills --skill micro-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.