ISCA

Welcome to San Diego, to ISCA'03, and to the Fourth Federated Computing Research Conference! It has been a pleasure to serve as Symposium Chairman, chiefly due to the opportunity to work with the volunteers and staff members mentioned below. I trust you will agree that the result of their efforts is again a conferences to be proud of, one that you are pleased to be attending. In addition to ISCA itself, I encourage you to take advantage of the FCRC activities, for example. the morning plenaries and the common breakfasts and lunches. If you can stay late Wednesday, I suggest the joint ISCA/SIGMETRICS workshop on Self-Managing Systems and if you stay longer, I recommend attending other FCRC constituent conferences.ISCA is widely regarded as the conference on computer architecture and the program committee has ensured that the 2003 symposium will be no exception. I am confident you will agree that the committee, under Kai Li's leadership, has once again put together a program of the highest technical excellence. Of course this excellence begins with first class submissions and this year's authors are to be congratulated on their successful efforts. This year, we were fortunate to receive financial support from IEEE Micro and Intel for our provocative panel on subsetting the SPEC benchmark suite.We used a conference review package, which was used by several program committees in computer architecture, to process the reviews. I would like to thank Dirk Grunwald for his initial development of the package and for his continuous help throughput the review process. Christine Lv served as our webmaster. She implemented several extensions to the package and her efficiency, patience and dedication greatly help the entire review process.The program committee reviewed the submissions carefully through the whole process. We continued the tradition of blind review process. Program committee members learned about the authors only at the time of the program committee meeting. Each paper was assigned to five program committee members, of which three served as primary and two served as secondary. The primary members reviewed the paper, while the secondary members were responsible for getting external reviews. We adopted the rebuttal process that used last year. The authors were given three days to respond to the initial reviews before the program committee meeting. We found the rebuttal process not only helped the program committee to clarify issues, but also set an early deadline for the reviewers to complete their reviews. The program committee met in Princeton on January 18, 2003. All committee members were provided with accesses to all reviews and numerical scores for all non-committee-authored papers. In general, we processed papers in the order of their rankings, but we only used the rankings as a guide. One of the primary program committee members acted as a lead to present the reviews and the authors' responses to the entire the program committee at the program committee meeting. The decision on each paper was made only after all program committee members who had read it expressed their opinions to the program committee and only after the program committee reached a consensus. Papers co-authored by program committee papers were handled in special sessions where the authors were not present. The committee accepted 8 out of 26 committee-authored papers. In the end, the program committee accepted 36 papers for the conference and one position paper for the panel "Subsetting SPEC when measuring results: valid or manipulative?" For three of the papers, a program committee member was asked to "shepherd" the revision process. The result is an excellent program you find in the proceedings.