ISMM 2018

Welcome to the website of the ISMM 2018 conference.

Keynote: Getting to Go - Richard L. Hudson

The Go language features, goals, and use cases have forced us to rethink the entire garbage collection stack and have led us to a surprising place. The journey has been exhilarating. This talk describes our journey. It is a journey motivated by open source and Google’s production demands. Included are side hikes into dead end box canyons where numbers guided us home. This talk will provide insight into the how and why of our journey, where we are in 2018, and Go’s preparation for the next part of the journey.

Richard L. Hudson (Rick) is best known for his work in memory management including the invention of the Train, Sapphire, and Mississippi Delta algorithms as well as GC stack maps which enabled garbage collection in statically typed languages such as Modula-3, Java, C#, and Go. Rick is currently a member of Google’s Go team where he is working on Go’s garbage collection and runtime issues.

Contact: rlh@golang.org

ISMM 2018: Call for Papers

The International Symposium on Memory Management (ISMM 2018) is soliciting full-length submissions covering new work on memory management topics, as well as papers presenting confirmations or refutations of important prior results. Surveys and comparative analyses that shed new light on previously published techniques are also welcome.

Areas of interest include but are not limited to:

• Memory allocation and de-allocation
• Garbage Collection algorithms and implementations
• Formal analysis and verification of memory management algorithms
• Compiler analyses to aid memory management
• Tools to analyze memory usage of programs
• Empirical analysis of memory intensive programs
• Formal analysis and verification of memory intensive programs
• Memory system design and analysis
• Hardware support for memory management
• Memory management for new or non-traditional systems
• Novel memory architectures
• Memory management at datacenter and cloud scales

All papers must be submitted on-line in Portable Document Format (PDF). The submission site is at http://ismm18.hotcrp.com

The Program Committee (PC) and External Review Committee (ERC) will read submissions and judge them on scientific merit, innovation, readability, and relevance. Papers previously published or already being reviewed by another conference are not eligible. If a closely related paper has been submitted elsewhere, the authors must notify the Program Chair as per the SIGPLAN republication policy. Papers should be self-contained. Reviewers are not required to read appendices, so a paper should be intelligible without them. Supplemental or auxiliary materials are not accepted.

Submissions must be in English and papers should be formatted according to the two-column ACM proceedings format. Each paper should have no more than 10 pages, excluding bibliography and any appendices, in 9pt font (or larger). There is no limit on the page count for references. Each reference must list all authors of the paper (do not use et al). The citations should be in numeric style, e.g., [52]. Submissions should be in PDF format and printable on US Letter and A4 sized paper. Make sure that figures and tables are legible, even after the paper is printed in gray-scale. See Important Dates for the submission deadline.

As explained in more detail at http://www.sigplan.org/Resources/Author, LaTeX users should use the (new) sigplan subformat of the (new) acmart format by downloading acmart-sigplanproc.zip. Word users should use the acmart template for Word. These are new files compared to last year. If we identify questions that are asked frequently about these new files, then we will create an FAQ. For now, note the following:

• acmart-sigplanproc-template.tex has the following defaults for ISMM 2018 submissions: the first line says \documentclass[sigplan,10pt,review,anonymous]{acmart}\settopmatter{printfolios=true,printccs=false,printacmref=false}. The default citation style is numeric, and the defaults are correct for ISMM except the font size. If authors desire the 9pt font, as is allowed, this should be changed in the documentclass line.
• Do not mess with the class file or settings to try to sneak in additional space. (Conversely, you may toggle the printccs and printacmref flags if you wish, but this will consume space.)
• Do not use the PACMPL files or format; ISMM is not using them. However, the template files were designed to make migrating a paper from one format to the other as simple as possible.

Papers that violate the above guidelines will be rejected by the Program Chair.

All accepted papers will appear in the published proceedings.

Double-Blind Reviewing

The ISMM paper reviewing process is double blind: authors are not known to the reviewers and reviewers are not known to authors. This is to authors’ benefit, since research indicates that author anonymity reduces bias in reviewing. Authors are required to make reasonable efforts not to disclose their identities to reviewers. For example, authors should not attach names nor mention institution, research group, project name, etc. Authors should refer to projects and prior work in the third person, e.g. “the XYZ project” or work by “Author et al.”, as with discussion of all related work. Where necessary for flow, authors may add a footnote that a name is withheld for review. Paper drafts should not be made public to reduce the possibility of inadvertently revealing author identity to reviewers. Reviewers are honor-bound not to try to discover authors’ identities, which will be known only by the Program chair until the appropriate point in the Program Committee’s deliberations. Authors are required to declare known conflicts with members of the PC and ERC at submission time, as defined by SIGPLAN guidelines: http://www.sigplan.org/Resources/Policies/Review/

External Review Committee

ISMM 2018 follows the practice introduced at earlier instances of ISMM of using a separate External Review Committee as part of the reviewing process. The ERC complements the Program Committee by providing a broader and deeper pool from which to draw expert reviews. The same reviewing standards apply to the ERC as for the PC. However, ERC members review fewer papers and do not participate in the PC meeting. ERC members review and decide acceptance for submissions by PC members. This approach should be more practical with double-blind reviewing than ad hoc expert review assignments as used by a number of conferences. The formal selection process, transparency of its constituency, and the fact that each reviewer will review multiple papers should increase the quality and accountability of reviews as compared to traditional ad hoc expert review assignments.

Rebuttal

The rebuttal process will occur at the end of March 2018 (see Important Dates), and will give the authors an opportunity to respond to factual errors in reviews before the Program Committee meets to make its decisions. The committee may, but need not, respond to rebuttals or revise reviews at or after the committee meeting.

Acknowledgments

This call-for-papers is an adaptation and evolution of content from previous instances of ISMM and PLDI. We are grateful to prior organizers for their work, which is reused here.