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.

Submissions to be made via HotCRP.

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:

  • 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
  • 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.

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 the track chairs who can facilitate it.

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” and submitted to the industry HotCRP website. Industry Track papers must be in the standard ACM double-column format for conference proceedings and must not exceed 10 pages, including all figures and tables, but not including references and appendices. Appendices will not be published in the conference proceedings, so submissions should be self-contained, with appendices only including supplementary material. The camera-ready version of accepted papers may use up to 2 additional pages to address reviewer comments, but may not add significant non-reviewed content.

The Industry track does NOT use double-blind review.

The 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 2027 Artifact Track .

ACM Publication Policies and Open Access

For more information on the ACM Publication Policies, please refer to the call for contributions page.

Industry Chairs

  • Sören Henning, Dynatrace, Austria
  • Sai Malleni, Nvidia, USA

Program Committee

For a list of program committee members, please refer to the program committee page.