--- name: brycewang-stanford/asplos-related-work source: https://app.decimal.ai/s/brycewang-stanford-asplos-related-work@1/SKILL.md source_sha256: a7dda85e4c73 --- # ASPLOS Related Work An ASPLOS reviewer pool is assembled from three communities, and each reviewer checks whether *their* literature is handled competently. Related work at this venue is therefore a coverage problem across parallel lanes — a paper positioned beautifully against the OS literature and blankly against the architecture literature reads as half-researched to half its reviewers. ## The five lanes | Lane | What must be shown | Failure the lane's reviewers spot | |---|---|---| | Architecture (ISCA/MICRO/HPCA lineage) | The hardware structure or mechanism is new relative to prior microarchitectural work | Reinvented prefetcher/hint/metadata scheme under a new name | | OS/systems (SOSP/OSDI/EuroSys/ATC lineage) | The policy/runtime layer differs from existing kernel or hypervisor mechanisms | "The kernel already does this with tunables" | | PL/compilers (PLDI/POPL/CGO lineage) | Language/compiler-level alternatives are acknowledged when the problem admits them | Hardware solution to a problem the compiler community solved statically | | Accelerator/domain (when applicable) | Placement in the accelerator design space with honest technology normalization | Comparing against a three-generation-old design point | | Prior ASPLOS | The intersection lineage itself — what earlier cross-layer attempts did | Missing the exact ASPLOS paper a PC member wrote or shepherded | For the last lane, mine the venue's own memory: the ACM DL ASPLOS series and the Influential Paper Award list (see `../../resources/exemplars/library.md`) identify the papers the community regards as canonical for a given boundary. ## Differentiate on the boundary, not the components The distinctive ASPLOS positioning move: prior work usually shares *components* with yours (a similar hardware structure, a similar kernel policy) while drawing the **hardware/software boundary elsewhere**. Say precisely where each prior system draws it and why yours moves it: ```text Template, per closest-prior system: " provides at , which requires . Because it keeps in , it cannot . We move to , which is what makes possible." ``` Three such paragraphs beat fifteen one-line dismissals — and the systems that get this treatment should be the ones a hostile reviewer would name. ## Double-blind handling of your own line of work (2027 rules) - Cite your prior published work **in the third person**, treated exactly like a competitor's system. - Your own arXiv postings and tech reports are **not prior publications** under the 2027 CFP, and the submission **may ignore them** — you are not forced into contortions differentiating against your own preprint. - A workshop paper this submission extends, or your related manuscript under review elsewhere, goes in as **anonymized supplemental material** so reviewers can judge the delta (mechanics in `asplos-supplementary`). - Never use "removed for blind review" placeholders — disallowed wording. ## Format constraints that reshape this section ASPLOS's citation rules (verified 2026-07-08) have an underappreciated interaction with related work: every entry needs **all co-authors' full first and last names** and a DOI/link, which makes each citation *long*. Since references are outside the 11-page limit this costs no body pages — but it means bibliography hygiene is a real task: budget an editing pass to expand names (`asplos-submission` has the mechanical sweep) rather than discovering 90 malformed entries at the deadline. ## Timing and staleness - Sweep the most recent two editions of ASPLOS, ISCA, MICRO, SOSP/OSDI, and PLDI before each gate (the September 9, 2026 deadline follows a spring conference season — its output is your reviewers' freshest context). - Concurrent work that appears between cycles: acknowledge it neutrally in a revision or camera-ready; a Major Revision's change note is an expected place to add "since submission" positioning. ## Building the lane map before writing Construct the section from a spreadsheet, not from memory: 1. For each lane, list the 5-10 systems a reviewer from that community would expect to see; source them from the last two editions' proceedings tables of contents (ACM DL for ASPLOS/ISCA/MICRO/SOSP; the respective sites for USENIX and SIGPLAN venues) rather than from citation chains, which propagate one group's blind spots. 2. Mark each entry: boundary-competitor (gets a template paragraph), component-overlap (grouped sentence), or context (grouped citation). 3. Have the co-author closest to each community audit their lane's list — the embarrassing omission is almost always in the lane nobody on the team calls home. 4. Recheck the map at every gate: between April and September a spring conference season publishes, and a reviewer's own new paper is the citation they miss first. ## Using the venue's own canon The Influential Paper Award list is a positioning instrument, not just an exemplar source: if your boundary has an award-validated ancestor (an accelerator argued from data movement, a virtualization boundary redraw — see `../../resources/exemplars/library.md`), citing the lineage and stating your delta against it signals venue literacy to every senior reviewer. Conversely, discovering that a canon paper already occupies your claimed boundary is cheaper during this pass than in a review. ## Where the section lives With 11 figure-inclusive pages, a late monolithic related-work section is expensive real estate. The pattern that survives compression: inline differentiation at first mention for the two or three boundary-competitors (they are part of the argument, not an appendix to it), plus a compact lane-organized section that proves coverage. What must not be compressed away is the boundary-competitor analysis — cutting it saves half a page and costs the review that says "does not engage with ." ## Output format ```text [Lane coverage] arch / OS / PL / accelerator / prior-ASPLOS — each: covered / thin / n-a [Boundary paragraphs] closest-prior systems given the template treatment: list [Hostile-reviewer test] the 3 systems a skeptic would name — all addressed? Y/N [Own-work handling] third-person OK · supplements needed · arXiv stance decided [Bibliography hygiene] full-name + DOI pass scheduled/done [Staleness] newest cited edition per lane ```