Open Mainframe Project Launches Annual Summer Internship to Help Train the Next Generation of Mainframe Engineers

SAN FRANCISCO, May 30, 2019 – The Open Mainframe Project (OMP), an open source initiative that enables collaboration across the mainframe community to develop shared tool sets and resources, announced the launch of this year’s internship program with 9 global students. Each intern will be paired with mentors from Open Mainframe Project member organizations such as Red Hat, IBM, Sine Nomine Associates and SUSE who designed a project to address a specific mainframe development or research challenge. Mainframes are often seen as traditional and antiquated technology. However, the mainframe is the core IT system handling critical data and applications for organizations in finance, retail, insurance, transportation and the government. In fact 96% of new initiatives are powered by mainframes. Open Mainframe Project increases awareness of open source being a technology driver for the mainframe and is dedicated to educating the future mainframe engineers.

In its fourth year, the annual OMP internship program has helped 32 students learn more and gain experience with Linux, open source and mainframes. This year, almost 100 applicants applied, which is a 43% increase from 2018. As a result, OMP increased the number of interns to 9 with six projects including compliance engine, dockerHub development stacks, BoringSSL, Kubernates on Z and Zowe, Open Mainframe Project’s framework that strengthens integration with modern enterprise applications. The mentors will provide regular evaluations and feedback during the 15-week program, which kicks off this week. Interns can work from anywhere and will be invited to travel to an industry conference where they will recap their experience at the end of the internship.

“The mainframe is the heart of many businesses and Open Mainframe Project is dedicated to training the next generation of mainframers to get into a lucrative career,” said John Mertic, Director of Program Management for the Linux Foundation and Open Mainframe Project. “With the ability to work remotely and learn from current leaders, this is a huge stepping stone for students that has an immense impact on the open source and mainframe communities. We look forward to watching their progress and see what these interns can do.”

Hosted by The Linux Foundation, the Open Mainframe Project is comprised of more than 30 business and academic leaders that collaborate to educate the next generation of mainframe engineers including ADP, Broadcom, Docker, Marist, North Carolina A&T State University, Rocket Software, Ubuntu, VCU, Vicom Infinity and William Paterson University. OMP strives to build an inclusive community through investment in programs, career development, and events that provide opportunities to underrepresented and disadvantaged groups around the world.

Additional details on the OMP projects, mentors, and students can be found below.

The Compliance Project: Students will develop a compliance engine where rules are added and then analyze by the compliance engine, which will check whether blockchain records conform to those rules. The two mentors are Petr Novotny, Research Staff Member in Enterprise Solutions group at IBM Research, and Donna Dillenberger, IBM Fellow at IBM’s Watson Research Center will work with Shivam Singhal, a Computer Science and Engineering student at the University of Washington and a bug squasher with Mozilla Addons Ecosystem. Priyanka Advani, a student in the Master’s in Computer Science Program at Santa Clara University, will also work on this project. She has more than seven years of experience working in the mainframe industry.

The DockerHub Development Stacks : This project will produce a suite of Docker images for OpenSUSE and ClefOS (a CentOS clone for Z). These are all based on a CentOS clone called ClefOS. The source for most of these (excluding the OpenShift and Source-to-Image images).

Neale Ferguson, Principal Engineer at Sine Nomine Associates, will work closely with Vedarth Sharma, a programmer who has contributed to open source projects for two years, and Kautila Tripathi, a backend developer who has a rich history of contributing to the open source community.

Big-Endian Support for BoringSSL : BoringSSL gained popularity when Google used OpenSSL for many years in various ways and as Google’s product portfolio became more complex, more copies of OpenSSL sprung up and the effort involved in maintaining all these patches in multiple places was growing steadily. This project aims to add support for Big Endian systems such as Z. Neale Ferguson will also lead this project and mentor Sladyn Nunes, a Computer Science and Engineering student from Mumbai University.

Boost Context Module implementation for s390x : – boost.context is a foundational library that provides a cooperative multitasking on a single thread. This project aims to fix the missing module blocks and help other projects get available on the s390x. Dan Horak, Senior Software Engineer at Red Hat, will lead this project with Naveen Naidu, a Computer of Science and Engineering student in India and 2018’s Google Code mentor for Coala.

Cloud Foundry Operator for Kubernates on Z : The goal of this project is to successfully build and test the incubating Cloud Foundry Operator on Z. Vlad Iovanov, Technical Lead for Cloud Foundry at SUSE, will work with Dan Pavel Sinkovicz, a Computer Software Engineering student at the University of Northampton.

Open Mainframe Project’s Zowe Features Addition : Zowe offers modern interfaces to interact with z/OS and allows you to work with z/OS in a way that is similar to what you experience on cloud platforms today. The focus of this project would be to create new applications/plugins for Zowe. Matt Hogstrom, Zowe Leadership Community Chairperson and Chief Architect and Distinguished Engineer for IBM, will mentor Yash Jain, a Computer Science and Engineering student at the University of Mumbai, and Usman Haider, a master’s student at National University of Science Technology.

Additional Resources:

• Getting Started documentation site
• OMP’s I am a Mainframer Podcast
• OMP’s Internship Program

About the Open Mainframe Project

The Open Mainframe Project is intended to serve as a focal point for deployment and use of Linux and Open Source in a mainframe computing environment. With a vision of Open Source on the Mainframe as the standard for enterprise class systems and applications, the project’s mission is to Build community and adoption of Open Source on the mainframe by eliminating barriers to Open Source adoption on the mainframe, demonstrating the value of the mainframe on technical and business levels, and strengthening collaboration points and resources for the community to thrive. Learn more about the project at https://www.openmainframeproject.org.