The annual summer mentorship program remains the best tool for the Open Mainframe Project to engage with students. This program has successfully provided more than 200 students with hands-on learning experiences in Linux, Open Source, and Mainframes. Our mentees use the knowledge and experience they gain from their mentorships throughout their academic pursuits and careers.
This year, there are 13 mentorship opportunities for the summer term, which begins on June 1. Our programs this year include Open Mainframe Projects such as:
- COBOL Programming Course
- COBOL Working Group
- Feilong
- Galasa
- Mainframe Open Education
- Modernization Working Group
- Zopen Community
- Zowe
The deadline to submit applications is Friday, May 9. Learn more about the mentorships here:
COBOL Programming Course
Hands-on Lab Development
Mentors:
- Michael Bauer, Engineering Manager at Broadcom
- Sudharsana Srinivasan, IBM Z Influencer Program Manager at IBM
Description:
The COBOL Programming Course uniquely offers an opportunity for learners to gain hands-on experience with mainframe and COBOL development. To further this differentiation, we need to add more comprehensive labs to the course. This program will add at least 5 hands-on labs as well to reinforce what is learned in the course.
COBOL Working Group
Addressing the COBOL “Crisis”
Mentors:
- Cameron Seay, Instructor at East Carolina University
- Jeff Brown, Co-Director of Research and Development, Eli Madison Memorial Mainframe Apprenticeship (EMMA)
Description:
This program will result in a white paper which identifies, investigates the feasibility, and builds a proof of concept for the creation of a tool (or wrapper) for the collection, consolidation, organization, and distribution of an instructor’s class materials, such as, but not limited to:
- Recorded lectures
- Slide presentations
- Lecture notes
- Lab assignments into a learning management system (LMS)
This tool (or wrapper) will also collect, consolidate, organize, and distribute the student’s work submissions to include, but not limited to:
- Lab submissions
- Quiz and test answer sheets
- Program listings
Feilong
Give Love to the Bug List
Mentors:
- Aazam Thakur, Student and 2024 Open Mainframe Project Mentee
- Eric Bischoff, Quality Engineering Specialist at SUSE
- Mike Friesenegger, Solution Architect at SUSE
Description:
Feilong RESTful API makes it easy to manage Linux virtual machines on z/VM mainframes. It is at the center of products like IBM’s Cloud Infrastructure Center. Feilong’s bug list currently consists of 98 bugs in Launchpad and 19 issues in GitHub.
The purpose of the mentorship is to review them, move them to GitHub, classify them, experiment and play, and for the easiest ones, even provide fixes, or close them if no longer relevant. The work does not need to be exhaustive; it is envisioned more as a musing with technical issues and as a discovery of the mainframe world.
z/VM and Linux Modern Administration
Mentors:
- Aazam Thakur, Student and 2024 Open Mainframe Project Mentee
- Michael MacIsaac, z/VM and Linux Systems Administrator at ADP
- Mike Friesenegger, Solution Architect at SUSE
Description:
z/VM must be maintained using 3270 “green screens”. There is no pipeline of young professionals learning this interface. This solution tries to modernize z/VM by allowing as much administration as possible to be done from a browser. This program will connect zLMA (the frontend) with Feilong (the backend) via APIs.
Galasa
Galasa Test Run Web User Interface
Mentors:
- Eamonn Mansour, Software Engineer at IBM
- Mike Cobbett, Senior Software Engineer at IBM
Description:
Galasa is a test runner. Users can ask it to run tests inside the Galasa test service. When those tests have completed, we want to extend the existing web-based user interface to allow users to view test results, artifacts, run logs so that problem diagnosis can be done without downloading large files to a client machine. This is an important missing piece of the existing Galasa open source project, and will contribute to the growth in adoption of the Galasa project.
Mainframe Open Education
Enhancing Marketing and Communication for Mainframe Open Education
Mentors:
- J.J. Lovett, Head of Education & Customer Engagement at Broadcom
- Lauren Valenti, Director, Mainframe Education, Customer Engagement, Vitality and Mainframe Expert Program at Broadcom
- Nanxi Meng, Learning Experience Researcher and Instructional Designer at Broadcom
Description:
This program will enhance and improve marketing and communication efforts by the program while helping align content to the intended audience and provide outside/in perspective.
Modernization Working Group
Drive Mainframe Modernization with Agentic AI
Mentor:
- Suresh Tadisetty, Associate Director, Application Consulting at Kyndryl
Description:
The program aims to leverage agents built using publicly available large language models (LLMs) and personalize them with Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG). This approach creates various levels of agentic roles to transform mainframe workloads and modernize them at every phase, from discovery and design to transformation, testing, and deployment.
Guide to AI-based Mainframe Modernization Application
Mentor:
- Misty Decker, Mainframe Modernization Consult Leader at Kyndryl
Description:
The latest advancements in AI have led to significant growth in new capabilities in almost every field, including mainframe modernization. With new AI capabilities being added to existing tools and startups releasing new mainframe modernization capabilities, organizations have no idea what is available and what is real.
This program will research the application understanding and code transform capabilities available in the marketplace. The mentee will identify the key attributes that customers are looking for and create a framework for comparing options. The white paper will publish that framework along with an analysis of the vendors currently in the market.
In the process of researching this white paper, the mentee will have a better understanding of what organizations are looking for in application understanding and code transformation, the limitations of these capabilities today and decision criteria to consider when choosing a vendor. The mentee will gain contacts into each of the vendor organizations as they work with them to understand their capabilities.
Hybrid IT with Mainframes and Cloud
Mentor:
- Bruno Azenha, Global FSI Tech Strategy and Modernization at Red Hat
Description:
The mentorship program offers a mentee the chance to research, analyze, and document strategies for integrating mainframes, public cloud, and modern infrastructure. The mentee will work closely with a mentor and connect with top industry professionals.
RAG to Riches – Using Your Legacy Data
Mentor:
- Vinu Viswasadhas, Associate Director, Data Consulting at Kyndryl
Description:
In today’s data-driven world, leveraging legacy data can be a game-changer for businesses. By integrating AI with Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG), organizations can unlock the hidden potential of their historical data. RAG combines the power of large language models with a retrieval mechanism that fetches relevant information from vast datasets. This approach not only enhances the accuracy and relevance of AI-generated responses but also ensures that valuable insights from legacy data are utilized effectively. Whether it’s improving customer service, optimizing operations, or driving innovation, RAG empowers businesses to transform their legacy data into a rich source of actionable intelligence, paving the way for a more informed and strategic future.
Zopen Community
Bringing Open Source to Mainframes
Mentors:
- Igor Todorovski, Zopen Community Lead at IBM Canada Ltd.
- Sachin T., Software Developer at IBM
Description:
The zopen community is a collaborative initiative dedicated to modernizing the z/OS platform by porting widely used open-source tools and libraries. Our goal is to bridge the skill and technology gap between mainframes and other modern computing environments by making z/OS a first-class open-source platform. This program will contribute to this mission by having a mentee working alongside experienced developers to port and extend open-source software for z/OS.
Zowe
Go SDK for Zowe
Mentor:
- Zoran Krleza, Senior DevOps and SRE at True North
Description:
Zowe is an open source framework for integration with z/OS. It provides a number of integration options like CLI and SDKs that can be used from the application code to build a client application that interfaces with the mainframe. The purpose of this project is to develop a Zowe Client SDK for Go language which will provide programmatic APIs to perform basic mainframe tasks. The SDK and its APIs should cover basic mainframe tasks like z/OS job and dataset management, and it should be implemented to accommodate easy addition of other APIs.
zOS Performance Monitoring
Mentors:
- Joe Carlisle, Master Solutions Architect at Hitachi Vantara
- Krishi Jain, Software Engineer at Hitachi Vantara and 2024 Open Mainframe Project Mentee
Description:
The program will create a performance methodology used by a customer for analyzing RMF MON III data. The methodology will include:
- Understanding available RMF MON III data metrics using an IBM provided Data Dictionary.
- Translating the RMF MON III data metrics into ZOWE ZEBRA variables which are then ingested into a Prometheus database.
- Learning Grafana and how to build time series visualizations in dashboards using Prometheus as a Data Source.
- Introduce a performance methodology for analyzing RMF MON III data for bottlenecks and anomalies. This would require learning existing IBM zOS performance methodologies and building the concepts into Grafana dashboards for analytics and correlation. Data analysis will include performance and configuration data.
- Using the performance methodology and data visualization provided by Grafana dashboards, design AI/ML algorithms to automatically detect performance bottlenecks and anomalies. Output would include recommended remedies.
Mainframe Performance is a difficult and time consuming process. This program would introduce a performance methodology that can be easily customized by a customer and used to provide deep dive zOS performance analytics.
