Ranking conferences and journals is indeed a complex task. Different metrics exist and a plethora of different free and commercial rankings exists. My favorite ranking so far was the AUS conference ranking that based mostly on opinions of researchers. While this is probably the best metric, it can be very biased (Australian researchers only?) and some conferences (such as Euro-Par) are just not listed. Another metric, the average citations per paper (often called “impact factor”) may be useful. While this may be biased towards older conferences (which may have higher rankings by this metric), it also shows how many active researchers follow a particular conference series.
I listed some conferences and journals that are in the HPC or Supercomputing field (I published in most of them) with their average citations per paper and their AUS ranking. This data was mainly for my own reference, however, several people asked me to publish this list, thus I will do this here. This list is not intended to be complete and, most importantly, the rankings do not represent my personal opinion (you have to ask me for this :-)); all data is based on the database from Microsoft Academic Search link queried on Dec. 3rd 2011. The age of the conference (as shown in MS Academic Search) is in brackets. Feel free to contact me if you think that anything is missing, incomplete or erroneous.
Conferences
| Name | avg. citations per paper (age) | AUS Ranking |
| SPAA | 16.0 (22) | A |
| HPDC | 14.7 (19) | A |
| Supercomputing | 14.4 (27) | A |
| PPoPP | 14.3 (27) | A |
| ACM ICS | 13.3 (33) | A |
| PACT | 12.8 (16) | A |
| LCPC | 11.5 (22) | A |
| Hot Interconnects | 10.5 (20) | B |
| ICPP | 6.6 (36) | A |
| CCGRID | 6.0 (10) | A |
| IPDPS | 5.2 (20) | A |
| IEEE Cluster | 4.1 (13) | A |
| Euro-Par | 3.3 (16) | not rated |
| EuroMPI | 3.2 (15) | C |
| ISPDC | 3.1 (15) | C |
| PARA | 2.4 (17) | not rated |
| HIPC | 2.4 (12) | A |
| VECPAR | 1.8 (15) | B |
| ICCS | 1.6 (11) | A |
| PARCO | 1.6 (18) | C |
| ISPA | 1.0 (08) | B |
| HPCC | 0.9 (17) | B |
Related Conferences
| Name | avg. citations per paper (age) | AUS Ranking |
| SIGCOMM | 40.8 (41) | A |
| ISCA | 30.8 (37) | A |
| PODC | 20.6 (28) | A |
| SIGMETRICS | 19.6 (38) | not ranked |
| CGO | 13.38 (8) | not ranked |
| Comp. Frontiers | 3.97 (6) | not ranked |
| ARCS | 1.2 (41) | not ranked |
Journals
| Name | avg. citations per paper (age) | AUS Ranking |
| TPDS | 14.3 (26) | A* |
| IJHPCA | 12.5 (24) | B |
| COMPUTER | 11.7 (41) | B (not sure) |
| JPDC | 9.0 (28) | A* |
| CONCURRENCY | 8.0 (22) | A |
| Elsevier PARCO | 6.9 (27) | A |
| Cluster Computing | 6.2 (18) | not rated |
| FGCS | 4.7 (27) | A |
| Journal of Supercomputing | 4.4 (27) | B |
| PPL | 4.2 (27) | B |
| IJPEDS | 2.6 (17) | B |
| SIMPRA | 1.7 (17) | not rated |