PACT

The International Conference on Parallel Architectures and Compilation Techniques (PACT) started as a Data Flow Workshop in conjunction with the ISCA 1989 in Israel but has quickly evolved into a unique venue at the intersection of parallel architecture and compilers.

This year we celebrate PACT's 25th anniversary as a mature multi-disciplinary conference that brings together researchers from modern hardware and software areas to present original research related to the parallel computing systems and their applications. PACT covers topics ranging from instruction-level and thread-level parallelism to low power wearable multicore systems and heterogeneous CPU-GPU computing systems.

This September, PACT returns to Israel, which represents a timely recognition of the contributions to the field made by researchers from this country. Haifa, our conference venue on the shores of the Mediterranean Sea, is home to a large and diverse set of high-tech companies and top universities.

PACT 2016 received 180 initial paper abstracts that materialized in 119 actual submissions from countries all over the world. The submitted papers have undergone a rigorous two phase review process. To maintain fairness and uniform standards, we have used a double blind review process throughout. Each of the 119 submissions has been reviewed in the first phase by at least three members of the Program Committee (PC) and External Review Committee (ERC). After the first rebuttal phase and one week of online discussions, reviewers reached a consensus to relegate about half of the submissions. Their authors were subsequently notified. In the second phase the remaining papers have received at least two additional reviews representing. After a second rebuttal period PC and ERC members continued their online discussions to either reach an early consensus or establish the need for further discussion at the PC meeting. Finally the PC members met on June 27 on the campus of the University of Chicago and accepted 31 of the 58 papers that advanced to the second stage. To improve the quality of the program almost half the papers were shepherded by a PC member.

Because there were many quality papers which could not be accommodated as regular contributions, the PC decided to invite several papers which had been reviewed during the second phase to be presented as posters at the conference. As a result 14 papers are be published as 2 page abstracts. The posters were presented during a special two hour late afternoon session. We found that the two phase review and two rebuttal periods resulted in a manageable average load of 9 papers for each PC member and offered authors timely opportunities to respond to all reviews.

This year we also had an Artifact Evaluation Committee which evaluated five submitted papers and gave all of them the AE stamp of approval. Many thanks go to Zheng Wang, Hugh Leather and their team for their hard work.