OpenPOWER Summit 2021

The teaching of the inter-related areas of computer architecture, computer organization, and computer systems is at a crossroads, one that could lead to another pedagogical (r)evolution. The first revolution occurred in the early 1990s, spurred by research in the 1980s that re-visited RISC architectures and resulting in the seminal book entitled "Computer Architecture: A Quantitative Approach" in 1989 and its subsequent prequel book entitled "Computer Organization and Design: The Hardware/Software Interface" in 1993, both centered around the MIPS instruction set architecture (ISA). By the 2000s, many institutions in higher education transitioned their traditional course on operating systems concepts to a hands-on computer systems curriculum based on the CISC x86-64 ISA, as captured by the seminal book entitled "Computer Systems: A Programmer’s Perspective." While these books have served as exemplars for their respective areas, one might argue that the use of disparate ISAs – MIPS versus x86-64 – serves as an unnecessary learning impediment and source of confusion. A potential solution to this problem would be to align the teaching of all these inter-related areas with the MIPS ISA entirely or x86-64 ISA entirely; however, the former has limited real-world deployment while the latter is closed (and unnecessarily complex, i.e., CISC). In contrast, the POWER architecture is open source and enjoys widespread deployment, including two of the fastest supercomputers in the world (i.e., Sierra at Lawrence Livermore National Lab and Summit at Oak Ridge National Lab). For these reasons, we envision a vertically integrated curriculum from hardware to systems software based on the POWER instruction set architecture.