micro-artifact-evaluation

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Use when preparing a MICRO artifact for post-acceptance evaluation — packaging simulators, configs, traces, and scripts so evaluators can regenerate the paper's figures, targeting the ACM Available/Functional/Reproducible badges, handling licensed workloads and long simulations, and earning the optional artifact appendix.

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MICRO Artifact Evaluation

MICRO runs artifact evaluation after acceptance: authors of accepted papers are invited to submit artifacts, an Artifact Evaluation Committee reviews them, and successful papers carry ACM badges in the proceedings. Anchors here are the MICRO 2025 AE pages (micro58/submit/artifacts.php, verified 2026-07-08); the 2026 edition's AE page and calendar are 待核实 — expect the same architecture, verify the dates.

Badge targets and what each demands

Badge (ACM)	Bar	Microarchitecture-specific gotcha
Artifact Available	Deposited on a public archival repository — Zenodo, FigShare, Dryad named in 2025	A GitHub repo alone fails; it is not archival. Deposit a tagged snapshot, keep GitHub as the living mirror
Artifact Functional	Documented, complete, exercisable	Simulator builds on a clean machine — your decade of dotfiles is not in the package
Results Reproducible	Evaluators regenerate the paper's main claims	Simulation time is the enemy: full SPEC runs take days-weeks; provide a subset path

Papers passing AE also earned, in 2025, the right to a two-page artifact appendix in the camera-ready, free of charge — reproduction instructions published with the paper.

The time-budget problem is the design problem

A MICRO artifact's hardest constraint is that cycle-level simulation is slow and evaluators have finite weeks. Design three nested entry points:

make smoke      # ~30 min: one workload region, one config — proves the plumbing
make key        # ~1 day:  the headline figure (Fig. 3) on a representative subset
make full       # ~1 week: every figure, every sweep — for the determined evaluator

Document expected runtime and disk for each. State which paper claims each tier supports. An evaluator who finishes make key in a day and sees Fig. 3 appear is an evaluator who awards the badge.

Package inventory

Top-level README: paper title, badge targets, the three entry points, a figure-to-command map ("Fig. 5 ⇐ make fig5, ~6 h"), hardware/software requirements (the 2025 process asked for these to route artifacts to suitable evaluators).
Environment capture: container image or pinned build script for the simulator toolchain; host assumptions stated (cores, RAM — parallel sims are memory-hungry).
Everything micro-reproducibility pinned: simulator commit + patches, config files for baseline/mechanism/ablations, manifests, plotting scripts.
Raw stats for the paper's figures, so evaluators can verify plots even before re-simulating — this alone often satisfies partial reproduction.

Licensed and unshippable inputs

SPEC CPU binaries/inputs cannot be redistributed. Ship the trace-generation recipe (tool version, SimPoint parameters, flags) plus, where licensing allows, the derived traces; otherwise document how an evaluator with a SPEC license regenerates them, and rest the Reproducible claim on shippable workloads.
Proprietary RTL or PDK data (synthesis libraries are NDA'd): report the flow and constraints, mark the RTL numbers as not independently reproducible, and scope the badge request to the simulation results. Honest scoping beats a failed evaluation.
FPGA/silicon dependencies: offer remote access if institutionally possible, or pre-recorded measurement logs with the analysis scripts.

Common failure modes, ranked by frequency of pain

Failure	Root cause	Prevention
Build breaks on evaluator machine	Undeclared host dependency (library, kernel version, python package)	Container or lockfile; test in a fresh VM
Numbers regenerate but differ slightly	Simulator nondeterminism or a config drifted after paper freeze	Determinism check + tagged commit at submission (`micro-reproducibility`)
Evaluator cannot find which command makes which figure	README written for the authors, not strangers	Figure-to-command map, tested by a labmate who did not build the artifact
Full run exceeds the AE window	No tiering	`smoke`/`key`/`full` entry points with honest runtime labels
Licensed inputs block everything	SPEC traces shipped nowhere, no fallback	Shippable-workload subset carrying the Reproducible claim

A dry run fixes four of the five: hand the package to someone outside the project with only the README, and watch — silently — where they stall.

Working with evaluators

AE is collaborative, not adversarial: expect questions, fix breakage fast, and keep a changelog of package updates during the window. Budget author-time in August–September (the window overlaps the September 11 camera-ready in the 2026 calendar — plan both, see micro-camera-ready). The final deposit that carries the Available badge must be the fixed package, re-uploaded to the archival repository with a new version DOI.

Minimal artifact layout that evaluators navigate well

artifact/
├── README.md            # badges sought, 3 entry points, figure-to-command map
├── Dockerfile           # or install.sh with pinned versions
├── Makefile             # smoke / key / full targets
├── configs/             # baseline.json, mechanism.json, ablations/
├── manifests/           # one YAML per experiment batch (micro-reproducibility)
├── stats-paper/         # the raw stats behind every published figure
├── plots/               # scripts: stats -> exact paper figures
├── traces/RECIPE.md     # how to regenerate licensed traces (nothing licensed inside)
└── LIMITS.md            # known fidelity gaps; claims stay inside them

Two conventions matter more than the tree itself: the README's first screen must answer "what do I run first and how long will it take," and nothing an evaluator needs may require reading source code to discover. If the paper linked an anonymized repo at submission (micro-supplementary), this layout should already exist — AE prep is then a de-anonymization pass plus the archival deposit.

Output format

[Badge plan] Available: deposit target · Functional: yes/no · Reproducible: scoped to <claims>
[Entry points] smoke/key/full runtimes measured on clean machine: <times>
[Figure map] figures with regenerate-commands: N/M
[Unshippables] licensed inputs + documented workaround each
[Environment] container/build-script tested from scratch: yes / no
[Calendar] AE dates vs camera-ready overlap plan (2026 dates 待核实)