Submission Guidelines

At a Glance

Paper must be submitted in printable PDF format.
Please number the pages of your submission.
The submission must be formatted for black-and-white printers. Please make sure your figures are readable when printed in black and white.
The submission must describe unpublished work that is not currently under review of any other conference or journal venues.
References must include all authors (i.e., do not use et al.).

This document is intended to serve as a set of guidelines for submissions to the 2021 BenchCouncil Symposium on Benchmarking, Measuring, and Optimizing (Bench’21). The format is derived from the IEEE template's IEEEtran.cls file, and is used with an objective of keeping the submission version similar to the camera-ready version. In an effort to respect the efforts of reviewers and in the interest of fairness to all prospective authors, we request that all submissions to Bench’21 follow the formatting and submission rules detailed below. Submissions that violate these instructions may not be reviewed, at the discretion of the program chair, in order to maintain a review process that is fair to all potential authors.

Paper Evaluation Objectives

The committee will make every effort to judge each submitted paper on its own merits. There will be no target acceptance rate. We expect to accept a wide range of papers with appropriate expectations for evaluation – while papers that build on significant past work with strong evaluations are valuable, papers that open new areas with less rigorous evaluation are equally welcome and especially encouraged.

Paper Formatting

Papers must be submitted in PDF. For a full paper, the page limit is 12 double column pages in TBench format (All research article page limits do not include references and author biographies). For a short paper, the page limit is 8 double column pages in TBench format, not including references and author biographies. The submissions will be judged based on the merit of the ideas rather than the length. We only wish to publish papers of significant scientific content. Very short papers (of fewer than 4 pages) may be moved to the back matter. Such papers will neither be available for indexing nor visible as individual papers on SpringerLink. They will, however, be listed in the Table of Contents.

Content

Reviewing will be double blind: please do not include any author names on any submitted documents except in the space provided on the submission form. You must also ensure that the metadata included in the PDF does not give away the authors. If you are improving upon your prior work, refer to your prior work in the third person and include a full citation for the work in the bibliography. For example, if you are building on your own prior work in the papers, you would say something like: “While the authors of [x][y] did X, Y, and Z, this paper additionally does W, and is therefore much better.” Do NOT omit or anonymize references for blind review. There is one exception to this for your own prior work that appeared in IEEE CAL, arXiv, workshops without archived proceedings, etc., as discussed later in this document.

Figures and Tables
It is essential that all illustrations are clear and legible. High resolution is required for the printed proceedings. Vector graphics (rather than rasterized images) should be used for diagrams and schemas whenever possible. Please check that the lines in line drawings are not interrupted and have a constant width. Grids and details within the figures must be clearly legible and may not be written one on top of the other. Line drawings are to have a resolution of at least 800 dpi (preferably 1200 dpi). The letter- ing in figures should not use font sizes smaller than 6 pt (~ 2 mm character height). Figures are to be numbered and to have a caption which should always be positioned under the figures, in contrast to the caption belonging to a table, which should always appear above the table. Figures and Tables should be cross referred in the text.
If screenshots are necessary, please make sure that the essential content is clear to the reader.

References
There is no length limit for references. Each reference must explicitly list all authors of the paper. Papers not meeting this requirement will be rejected. Authors of NSF proposals should be familiar with this requirement. Knowing all authors of related work will help find the best reviewers. Since there is no length limit for the number of pages used for references, there is no need to save space here.

Paper Submission Instructions

For information on Ethics in Publishing and Ethical guidelines for journal publication see http://www.elsevier.com/publishingethics and http://www.elsevier.com/ethicalguidelines.
Declaring Authors
Submission of an article implies that the work described has not been published previously (except in the form of an abstract or as part of a published lecture or academic thesis), that it is not under consideration for publication elsewhere, that its publication is approved by all authors and tacitly or explicitly by the responsible authorities where the work was carried out, and that, if accepted, it will not be published elsewhere including electronically in the same form, in English or in any other language, without the written consent of the copyright-holder. To verify originality, your article may be checked by the originality detection service https://www.elsevier.com/editors/plagdetectCrossCheck.

Areas and Topics
Authors should indicate these areas on the submission form as well as specific topics covered by the paper for optimal reviewer match. If you are unsure whether your paper falls within the scope of Bench, please check with the program chair – Bench is a broad, multidisciplinary conference and encourages new topics.

Declaring Conflicts of Interest
Authors must register all their conflicts on the paper submission site. Conflicts are needed to ensure appropriate assignment of reviewers. If a paper is found to have an undeclared conflict that causes a problem OR if a paper is found to declare false conflicts in order to abuse or “game” the review system, the paper may be rejected.
Please declare a conflict of interest with the following people for any author of your paper. A conflict occurs in the following cases:
1. Between advisors and advisees, forever.
2. Between family members, forever (if they might be potential reviewers).
3. Between people who have collaborated in the last FIVE years. This collaboration can consist of a joint research or development project, a joint paper, or when there is direct funding from the potential reviewer (as opposed to company funding) to an author of the paper. Co-participation in professional activities, such as tutorials or studies, is not cause for conflict. When in doubt, the author should check with the program chair.
4. Between people from the same institution or who were in the same institution in the last FIVE years.
5. Between people whose relationship prevents the reviewer from being objective in his/her assessment.
"Service" collaborations such as co-authoring a report for a professional organization, serving on a program committee, or co-presenting tutorials, do not themselves create a conflict of interest. Co-authoring a paper that is a compendium of various projects with no true collaboration among the projects does not constitute a conflict among the authors of the different projects.
On the other hand, there may be others not covered by the above with whom you believe a COI exists, for example, an ongoing collaboration which has not yet resulted in the creation of a paper or proposal. Please report such COIs; however, you may be asked to justify them. Please be reasonable. For example, you cannot declare a COI with a reviewer just because that reviewer works on topics similar to or related to those in your paper. The program chair may contact co-authors to explain a COI whose origin is unclear.
Most reviews will be solicited among the members of the program committee and the external review committee, but other members from the community may also write reviews. Please declare all your conflicts (not just restricted to the PC and ERC) on the submission form. When in doubt, contact the program chair.

Concurrent Submissions and Workshops
By submitting a manuscript to Bench’21, the authors guarantee that the manuscript has not been previously published or accepted for publication in a substantially similar form in any conference, journal, or the archived proceedings of a workshop (e.g., in the ACM/IEEE digital library) – see exceptions below. The authors also guarantee that no paper that contains significant overlap with the contributions of the submitted paper will be under review for any other conference or journal or an archived proceeding of a workshop during the Bench’21 review period. Violation of any of these conditions will lead to rejection.
The only exceptions to the above rules are for the authors' own papers in (1) workshops without archived proceedings such as in the ACM/IEEE digital library (or where the authors chose not to have their paper appear in the archived proceedings), or (2) venues such as IEEE CAL or arXiv where there is an explicit policy that such publication does not preclude longer conference submissions. In all such cases, the submitted manuscript may ignore the above work to preserve author anonymity. This information must, however, be provided on the submission form – the PC chair will make this information available to reviewers if it becomes necessary to ensure a fair review. If you have already put your manuscript on arXiv, in the interest of double-blind review, modify the title for the version you submit to Bench. As always, if you are in doubt, it is best to contact the program chair.
Finally, the ACM Plagiarism Policy and the IEEE Plagiarism Policy cover a range of ethical issues concerning the misrepresentation of other works or one's own work.

Acknowledgments

This document is derived from previous conferences, in particular ISCA 2021, ISCA 2019, MICRO 2019, ISCA 2020, and MICRO 2020.