The 59th IEEE/ACM International Symposium on Microarchitecture® (MICRO 2026)  invites submissions from undergraduate and graduate students to participate in the ACM Student Research Competition (SRC). Sponsored by ACM, the SRC at MICRO provides a unique forum for students to present their original research to an audience of experts in the field of computer architecture.

The top 3 undergraduate and top 3 graduate winners will receive monetary prizes, certificates, and medals. First-place winners in each category (undergraduate and graduate) will advance to the ACM Grand Finals, where they compete against winners from other top ACM conferences.

Important Dates & Information

  • Submission Deadline: August 6, 2026 AoE (GMT-12)
  • Notification: September 4, 2026 AoE (GMT-12)

Submit Abstracts

Submission Guidelines

Submit an extended abstract (maximum 800 words) describing your research. Top matter, figures/captions, and references are not counted in the word limit. In the abstract PDF, include your name and the name of your advisor(s), and indicate whether you are an undergraduate or a graduate student. For the paper formatting, please refer to the MICRO 2026 submission guideline .

Your abstract should include:

  • Top matter
    • Title
    • List of authors (see Eligibility below for details)
    • Submission category (i.e., graduate student or undergraduate student)
      • Problem and motivation
      • Background and related work
      • Novelty of the approach
      • Preliminary or final results
      • Contributions and significance

      All submissions must be made through MICRO 2026 SRC submission site.

Eligibility

A participant and submission in the SRC must meet all the following conditions:

  • Graduate Students (Master’s/Ph.D.): you can submit only individual research. If you are part of a group project, you can only present your own contribution to the project. Your abstract should have only you and your advisor(s) listed as authors.
  • Undergraduate Students (Associate’s/Bachelor’s): you can submit an individual or group project, but one student should be designated as the project representative. Graduate students are not allowed to be group members. The representative must be first author on the submission, poster, and presentation, and must be the person who attends the conference and makes the oral presentation. Your abstract should have all group members, along with your advisor(s), listed as authors. If selected as a winner, only the representative receives the prizes in their name.
  • Novelty
    • The abstract must have not appeared, or been accepted before the abstract deadline, in any published or presented form. Novelty is one of the criteria for selection.
    • You are allowed to have a parallel ongoing submission of the work in another conference, but you need to abide by self-plagiarism rules: at least 30% of both the SRC abstract and the other submission are unique/different from each other.
    • Accepted SRC abstracts will be posted on the MICRO website, but authors can reuse the content in a future (not parallel) submission to other conferences or journals.
  • Authorship
    • The abstract, poster, and presentation must be authored by the student participant.
    • For undergraduate group projects, other undergraduate students in the group may contribute to writing/editing/presenting the abstract, poster, and presentation.
    • Advisors are allowed only to serve in an advisory or editorial capacity.
  • ACM Membership: you must be an ACM student member, and must maintain student status, at the time of abstract submission. If you aren’t yet a member, you can easily sign up now: basic student membership is US $19 per year or less.
  • Attendance: if your abstract is accepted, you must register for and attend MICRO 2026 in person to present your work.
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For full eligibility details, visit the ACM SRC participation page .

Abstract Topics

We welcome submissions covering all areas of MICRO’s broad scope, including but not limited to:

  • Microarchitectural, architectural, compiler, and hybrid techniques for improving
    • Performance, power, and energy efficiency
    • Security, privacy, and reliability
    • Cost, complexity, and scalability
    • Programmer productivity, predictability, quality of service, and sustainability
  • Processor, memory, and storage architectures
  • Multicore and multiprocessor systems
  • Instruction-, thread-, and data-level parallelism
  • Prediction and Speculation
  • Memory Hierarchy
  • Cloud and datacenter-scale computing
  • IoT, mobile, and embedded architecture
  • Interconnection network, router, and network interface architecture
  • Accelerator-based, application-specific, and reconfigurable architectures
  • Architectural support for programming languages, compilation, software development, security and privacy, virtualization
  • Architectures for emerging technologies and applications
  • Architectural support for non-volatile/persistent memory
  • Quantum computing
  • In-/near-memory or in-/near-storage processing
  • Effects of circuits and technology on architecture
  • Architecture modeling and simulation methodologies
  • Evaluation and measurement of real computing systems

Selection Process

  • Abstracts will be reviewed by an expert panel for relevance, novelty, and quality.
  • Selected students will participate in a poster session at MICRO 2026.
  • Selected students from each category (graduate and undergraduate) in the poster session will be invited to present in the oral presentation session, where final winners will be selected.

Conatct

For any questions about the submission, please email the MICRO 2026 Student Research Competition Co-Chairs (Saugata Ghose or Christina Giannoula).