Evolution and Revolution of Computer Systems Courses with the Open RISC-V ISA

Abstract

Computer systems courses, including computer organization, architecture, operating system, compiler, and other relevant courses, play an important role in cultivating students' computational thinking, especially the ability of viewing hardware and software in a computer system as a whole. In order to help learners to better understand principles and concepts taught in lectures of aforementioned courses, some visionary instructors have started to design lab projects for their courses with real-world instruction set architectures (ISAs), such as MIPS, ARM and x86, or even request students to conduct projects on these ISAs-based hardware platforms. Meanwhile, with the overwhelming trend towards AI, IoT and heterogeneous computing, RISC-V, an open and free ISA, has emerged and recently attracted a lot of attention from both academia and industry. Compared with proprietary ISAs, RISC-V is more simple, affordable, extensible and compatible. Given this context, several arising questions can be examined and discussed in this BoF session. For example, 1) whether the computer systems courses should integrate RISC-V, 2) do we need minor (evolutionary) or major (revolutionary) curriculum changes with the involvement of RISC-V for each course or the entire CS curriculum, 3) how to help the majority of students accommodate to these changes, 4) what kind of new course materials should be provided to instructors, TAs and students, 5) whether it's possible for some senior students to tape-out their own RISC-V chip designs and finally produce a cornucopia of workable computing systems with this revolutionary and open curriculum.