Proceedings of the 2012 international symposium on Memory Management

Abstract

It is with great pleasure that we welcome you to the ACM SIGPLAN 2012 International Symposium on Memory Management (ISMM'12). This year continues ISMM's tradition as the top venue for presenting research results on memory management. This year ISMM'12 received 30 submissions out of which the program committee selected 12 to appear in the conference. These papers cover diverse and interesting aspects of memory management including multicore, program analysis, and mechanisms such as read and write barriers. We used a double-blind reviewing process, an external review committee (XRC) to add reviewer expertise, and a rebuttal process, all of which worked smoothly and efficiently. Each program committee (PC) member reviewed seven or eight papers in a four-week time period. In turn, the authors were given a rebuttal period of three days, during which they could answer reviewer questions. The rebuttal was not limited in content, but was limited in length. The XRC followed the effort started in 2008 to increase the breadth of the reviewer pool and the depth of reviewer expertise. Unlike PC members, XRC reviewers did not attend the PC meeting. The XRC provided expert reviews, but was established ahead of time, rather than on an ad-hoc basis. Each XRC member was assigned three to four papers to review. This light reviewing load encouraged XRC members to focus on producing especially careful critiques. All submissions received at least three PC reviews and at least one XRC review. All PC and XRC members had the opportunity to revise their reviews based on the rebuttal and based on discussions prior to and during the PC meeting. The XRC played no part in the final decisionmaking for non-PC submissions. All non-PC papers were discussed at the PC meeting on March 23, 2012, in Seattle. All PC members attended the entire meeting. PC members who had a conflict with a submission left the room during the discussions of their conflict papers. The software also prevented conflicted PC members from reading reviews or knowing the reviewers of conflicted papers. Only the committee members who reviewed the paper made the acceptance decisions. We discussed all non-PC papers. All authors were notified of the decisions by email on March 23. PC co-authored submissions were allowed, and we received four and three were accepted. The XRC provided four to five reviews for each of these submissions and met on a conference call on March 22, 2012. These papers were held to the customary higher standard. The General Chair, Martin Vechev, handled the conflicts of interest with the Program Chair. He assigned the reviewers and led the telephone discussions of these papers. Only XRC members who reviewed PC coauthored submissions participated in the call and in the final decision. We were very happy with blind reviewing, rebuttal, and the XRC mechanism. In particular, handling PC submissions with non-PC reviewers in a separate meeting worked quite well. In the discussion of each paper, the program chair asked a PC member to summarize the paper, its strengths and weaknesses, and the authors' response. In some cases the authors' response strongly influenced the final decision.