Industry Track

The Industry Track is a showcase for industrial contributions to performance engineering. This showcase is intended to facilitate:

  • Sharing of practical use of performance engineering, problems, best practices, and datasets from industry (better academic research)
  • Use of academic research in industry (better industry performance)
  • Interaction between industry practitioners and the academic community.

The Industry Track solicits contributions from industry practitioners, documenting practical uses of performance engineering, problems, best practices, and open problems. Submissions will be evaluated according to novelty of industrial application and general impact to the community. The evaluation is distinct from the research track. We encourage research, theory, or experience papers to be submitted to the research track regardless of author affiliation. Full evaluation criteria are described below in the “Rubric” section. Please note that unlike other ICPE tracks, the industry track is not double-blind. Using double-blind submissions would make the industrial contribution very difficult to assess, as reviewers could not know and understand the (industrial) context in which the study was done.

Exemplar submissions may take the form of:

  • How we took the ideas from paper “x” and integrated it into an industrial CI loop
  • How we address open problem y at scale
  • Why we couldn’t get theory/method z into production at scale and do A instead

Two example papers from previous conferences:

  • A paper from IBM investigating the trade-offs of different NVMe virtualization options in their cloud offering:
    • Lixiang Luo, I-Hsin Chung, Seetharami Seelam, Ming-hung Chen, and Yun Joon Soh. 2022. NVMe Virtualization for Cloud Virtual Machines. In Proceedings of the 2022 ACM/SPEC on International Conference on Performance Engineering (ICPE ‘22). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 37–46. https://doi.org/10.1145/3489525.3511688
  • A paper from LinkedIn describing the system for profiling their microservices in production:
    • John Nicol, Chen Li, Peinan Chen, Tao Feng, and Haricharan Ramachandra. 2018. ODP: An Infrastructure for On-Demand Service Profiling. In Proceedings of the 2018 ACM/SPEC International Conference on Performance Engineering (ICPE ‘18). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 139–144. https://doi.org/10.1145/3184407.3184433

Why You Should Submit a Paper

There are several strong reasons to submit a paper:

  • Prestige – this is a prestigious conference. Having a paper accepted makes you and your company look good.
  • Exposure – your ideas and their applications will be shared with the ICPE audience which makes it a great way to grow your technical reputation.
  • You get researchers thinking about your challenges and trying to solve your problems
    • This starts with the feedback you receive on your paper submission.
  • Participate in the community
    • Start a collaboration with others to solve an open issue

We know that submitting a paper to an academic conference can be an intimidating process for industrial practitioners. We have attempted to simplify this process as much as possible. We have a flexible page limit (get the idea right, don’t worry about length) and have clearly described (below) exactly how papers will be evaluated, dispelling any potential mystery.

We also know internal approval can be challenging and time consuming. We have two points to alleviate those concerns:

  1. All submissions are considered confidential until publication date according to ACM policy (reviewers and the ACM cannot disclose the ideas or use them in their own work).
  2. The Industry Track supports late retraction of submitted and accepted papers. We will communicate a final approval date for all accepted papers. Papers may be retracted up to that date.

Taken together, these two points should enable industry practitioners to submit papers without fear of premature technical disclosure and with the ability to retract the submission if they are unable to receive company approval for publishing the paper. A retracted paper is never published and considered confidential.

Evaluation Rubric

All submissions will be evaluated according to criteria specific to the Industry Track. The criteria highlight industrial contributions valued by the ICPE community.

  1. Originality of industrial application. Examples of original industrial application include (but are not limited to):
    • Discussion of the use of performance engineering methods, techniques, or theory in a novel way in practice
    • A new practical solution to a production problem
    • Documentation of a new open problem with industry impact (and why it’s not trivially solvable)
    • Novel solutions that need to be engineered to be applied to similar situations
    • Description of a previously undocumented industry best practice
  2. Impact to industry and to researchers
    • There should be impact to both industry and researchers
  3. Is the paper clear and readable?
  4. Does the paper clearly describe the remaining open problems for this work?
  5. Does this paper enable future research and/or future industrial application?
  6. Does the paper describe how the work fits into existing theory and previous practical work?

Of note, the interpretation of “originality” is very different for the industry track than it is for the research track. For example, a new theory should be submitted to the research track, while a new use of a theory at scale is appropriate to the Industry Track. Additionally, as the track values the sharing of information, submissions of old ideas that have not previously been published are considered novel.

Submissions

Industry and experience track papers should be clearly marked in the text as “Industrial Paper” . The expected size of the papers is up to 10 pages double column excluding references and appendices. Shorter papers are perfectly welcome – all papers are graded on the rubric above. Submissions are made via Easychair and must be in the standard ACM format for conference proceedings. More specifically, the double column formats have to be used for all paper submissions: Latex preferred, Word. If you require help or have questions about the submission process, please reach out to the track chair.

The Industry track does NOT use double-blind review.

Submission deadlines are listed on the important dates page.

Authors of accepted papers are invited (but not required) to submit an artifact to the ACM/SPEC ICPE 2024 Artifact Track.

Mentorship

If you need any help with your paper or just want to discuss how to organize and present your experience, mentors are available and may be requested at any point in the writing process. Request a mentor during paper submission or just send a note to icpe2024-industry@easychair.org.

Instructions for Authors from ACM

By submitting your article to an ACM Publication, you are hereby acknowledging that you and your co-authors are subject to all ACM Publications Policies, including ACM’s new Publications Policy on Research Involving Human Participants and Subjects. Alleged violations of this policy or any ACM Publications Policy will be investigated by ACM and may result in a full retraction of your paper, in addition to other potential penalties, as per ACM Publications Policy.

Please ensure that you and your co-authors obtain an ORCID ID, so you can complete the publishing process for your accepted paper. ACM has been involved in ORCID from the start and we have recently made a commitment to collect ORCID IDs from all of our published authors. The collection process has started and will roll out as a requirement throughout 2022. We are committed to improve author discoverability, ensure proper attribution and contribute to ongoing community efforts around name normalization; your ORCID ID will help in these efforts.

Industry Chair

  • Alexander Podelko, Amazon/AWS, USA

Contact: icpe2024-industry@easychair.org

Submissions to be made via Easychair.

Program Committee