Editorial: Letter from the Editor-in-Chief

I pleased to welcome you to the latest issue of IEEE Computer Architecture Letters (CAL). This issue includes papers with novel approaches to on-chip networks, accelerator architecture, memory consistency, and benchmarks. It has also been a year since our last letter to our readership, and I would like to update everyone on CAL’s progress. So far this year, we have had 60 submissions, which is about the same pace as last year, but up dramatically from prior years. The acceptance rate has actually dropped slightly, to 24 percent. Our turnaround time has also improved dramatically. In 2010 so far, 100 percent of submissions received a first decision within 2 months, 93 percent within 6 weeks (a 9 percent improvement over 2009), and 85 percent within one month (a 27 percent improvement over 2009). Our goal is that all submissions should be decided within one month, and we are continuing to work on procedures to achieve that. However, we never want to sacrifice the quality of a decision for the sake of expediency, and prefer to take extra time when necessary to get an extra review or clarify some aspect of a review. Once a paper is accepted and the final camera-ready copy is submitted, it is posted immediately in the Computer Society Digital Library and forwarded to IEEE Xplore, where it appears under CAL’s “forthcoming” papers until it appears in print. We look for papers that provide ideas or insights that are novel or likely to have lasting importance. We welcome papers presenting early work in new areas, and recognize that such work is also likely to provide only early evidence to support the paper’s claims. Papers on more established topics are expected to be able to provide stronger evidence in support of their claims. In the near future, we will be revising our review form to better clarify these standards to our reviewers. It is also important to note that, since CAL actively encourages submission of early work, we expect and hope that most work appearing in CAL will be extended and go on to full-length treatments in conferences or journals. There have been some questions about whether publishing in CAL could preclude such subsequent publication. In fact, many CAL papers have been extended and have appeared in computer architecture’s most prestigious conferences. However, to clarify any lingering questions, the IEEE Computer Society’s Transactions Operating Committee, which governs CAL and its transactions (as well as ACM’s and the IEEE Computer Society’s special interest groups, SIGARCH and TCCA, which sponsor most of computer architecture’s main conferences), have all stated policies that “a prior Letter paper should not bias reviewers’ evaluation of a subsequent conference, transaction, or magazine submission” as long as sufficient new material is presented in the full-length version. Over the past year, we have seen many members of the editorial board step down due to term limits. The IEEE Computer Society typically limits associate editors to two terms of two years each. However, since the entire initial board was appointed in January of 2006, when CAL became an official IEEE publication, some terms were staggered. In the past 18 months, we have seen the departure due to term limits of Michael Flynn, Allan Gottlieb, John Gurd, Haldun Hadimioglu, Mark Hill, Wen-mei Hwu, David Kaeli, Israel Koren, Rami Melhem, Shubu Mukherjee, Yale Patt, Ronny Ronen, Issac Scherson, and Per Stenstrom. I would like to extend my deepest thanks for their collective wisdom and hard work in helping make IEEE Computer Architecture Letters a success. We have also appointed many new leaders from our field to the editorial board. Since January, we have welcomed David August, David Brooks, Antonio González, R. Govindarajan, Christos Kozyrakis, José Martínez, Avi Mendelson, Andreas Moshovos, Mark Oskin, Li-Shiuan Peh, Norm Rubin, and Yuanyuan Zhou. These illustrious board members represent institutions from across the globe, are leaders in their fields, and expand the breadth of our board in many directions that have become important in the architecture field, including compilers, data centers, embedded systems and accelerators, parallel architectures, on-chip networks, storage systems, transactional memory, and novel technologies such as optics and quantum computing. We are continuing to expand the board—to look for new members over the next year in some of the above areas, as well as in high performance computing, security, and several other topic areas. I would especially like to thank our new Associate Editor-in-Chief, Sudhanva Gurumurthi, who has played an integral role in our improved turnaround time and has worked hard to publicize CAL and recruit new papers. Since there has been so much change in the Editorial Board, I would like to take the opportunity in the following several pages to introduce our entire board.