ASPLOS 2014 -- Salt Lake City

ASPLOS 2014 was the second ASPLOS conference that I've attended, the first being last year's ASPLOS in Houston.  Compared to 2013, this ASPLOS was significantly better across all fronts:  organization, quality of papers and presentations, provided food, hotel room quality, and especially the organized outings. The keynote speakers were not as good as previous conferences, but I really enjoyed the debate panel session. Also, I can't complain much, as the K2 paper from our research group was selected as the best paper!

The best sessions, in my opinion, were the virtualization, heterogeneity, and parallelism. Even the other sessions had at least one paper that attracted me and was relevant to my interests. Despite the high quality of presentations, I found that the physical layout of the two session rooms was very poorly thought out. During almost every session, I was easily distracted by the adjacent room's speaker, whom I could clearly hear through the walls. While this seems like a trivial issue, I would highly recommend that future ASPLOS sessions not be located directly next to each other unless the rooms are more soundproof. The poster session was very enjoyable, although the space was a bit cramped. I thought the quality of each poster was good and that each author was well prepared to answer difficult questions about their works.

Unfortunately, since most of the sessions had several high-quality papers, it was very difficult choosing which session I should attend. I think that ASPLOS is already large enough, as evidenced by the double-scheduled sessions, and I was forced to miss a number of presentations that I wanted to see due to conflicts with other quality works. I would heartily encourage the steering committee to not colocate ASPLOS with any other conferences (like HPCA), because it's already so large that most attendees are unable to see all the presentations they want.

As a co-author of a work published in this year's ASPLOS, I have to commend the PC on their impressively objective review process which resulted in very valuable feedback, both before and after the rebuttal period. I really am honored to have our work be accepted into such a prestigious conference, and I very much appreciate the generous travel grant which made the trip more affordable for me.