The area of computer systems spans a community of faculty in both Computer Science (CS) and Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) departments. While most of us in the systems community are convinced that students need an early introduction to the core ideas in computer systems, there is still some debate about where this introductory core systems course should fit in the CS and ECE curriculums. Here is how we have resolved this issue at Carnegie Mellon. Perhaps it will be a useful model for other schools.

At Carnegie Mellon, CS and ECE are in separate schools, with CS in the School of Computer Science and ECE in the Engineering School. The CS department offers the following core sophomore-level introductory systems course, based on the CS:APP text, for students in both departments:

15-213 Introduction to Computer Systems
Fall and Spring: 12 units (similar to 3 credit hours at other schools)
This course provides a programmer's view of how computer systems execute programs, store information, and communicate. It enables students to become more effective programmers, especially in dealing with issues of performance, portability, and robustness. It also serves as a foundation for courses on compilers, networks, operating systems, and computer architecture, where a deeper understanding of systems-level issues is required. Topics covered include machine-level code and its generation by optimizing compilers, performance evaluation and optimization, computer arithmetic, memory organization and management, networking technology and protocols, and supporting concurrent computation. Prerequisites: 15-113 (Introduction to C mini-course) and 15-211 (Data Structures and Algorithms in Java).

• For humanities, liberal arts, and non-CE (Computer Engineering) students in the engineering school, it is often the terminal course in their systems education.
• For CS and CE students, it serves as the foundational prereq for upper level systems courses offered in both the CS and ECE departments, including networks (CS), compilers (CS), databases (CS), operating systems (CS), embedded systems (ECE), distributed systems (CS), computer architecture (ECE), and parallel computer architecture (CS). Establishing 15-213 as a prereq for the upper level systems courses helps those instructors offer better courses because they can make assumptions about the general systems maturity of their students. For example, instructors in the ECE computer architecture course can now assume that students know how assembly language, caches, and virtual memory work, and thus they can focus right away on the more interesting and appropriate design issues such as ISA design, cache design, and TLB design.
• It provides our students with experience in programming C. This is important because the upper level CS and CE systems courses require knowledge of C, but the CS intro courses are all based on Java.