PACT

It is an honor to introduce the technical program for the 22nd International Conference on Parallel Architectures and Compilation Techniques. The conference has become a premier forum for presenting new contributions in computer architecture and compiler technology. It allows both communities to interact and exchange.

PACT 2013 received 208 paper submissions which is almost exactly the same number for the two previous years. These papers were handled by a PC committee of 47 members. Each PC member was personally responsible for his/her reviews. We did not use external reviewers.

This year, we implemented a two passes double blind review process. In the first pass, the paper was reviewed by 3 PC committee members. Then the authors had the opportunity to react through the rebuttal. After the rebuttal, each paper was assigned to an extra PC member, the advocate. The role of the advocate was crucial in the review process. The advocate had to read the reviews, the rebuttal and skim through the paper. When there was a clear consensus on the outcome of the reviews, the advocate validated the consensus. When there was no clear consensus, the advocate wrote a new review and often triggered an on-line discussion. This often allowed to reach a consensus before the PC meeting in either the accept or the reject category.

Thanks to John Cavazos, we held the PC meeting on the nice campus of University of Delaware on May 9. Due to diligent work of the whole committee before the meeting, we were able to reduce the maximum number of papers that could be discussed to 77. Moreover, we decided to concentrate the discussion on the controversial papers. The 22 papers with a clear accept consensus were accepted without discussion, 38 papers with no consensus were discussed and 17 papers with an average reject grade but with a strong defender were given a chance to be revived. We finally accepted 36 high quality papers (17% acceptance rate). We are particularly proud of the variety of the program with papers originating from the USA, China, Japan, Korea, India, Austria, Italy, Belgium and covering the whole spectrum of topics addressed by our communities.