March 15, 2021 is a milestone of sorts: it is 25 years to the day later than predicted by one pundit as the date the last mainframe would be turned off. The GenevaERS team has been working hard to celebrate this milestone by working to become a full-fledged project under the Linux Foundation’s Open Mainframe Project. Here’s where we have come from, and where we are going.
Progress to Date
GenevaERS was accepted as an incubation project on July 9, 2020. Since then the team has:
- Created the community, including a website, git repos, e-mail list and getting started guide
- Held twice a month Technical Steering Committee (TSC) meetings open to all, and an infrastructure meeting
- Worked with Vicom-Infinity to create a shared user community environment
- Removed software components incompatible with an open source community and prepared for our major code releases
- Fleshed out architectural direction for the coming intermediate term.
- And provided leadership for broader OMP initiatives, like the Open z/OS Enablement Project based upon our experience with shared environments. You can learn more about our relationship to our sister projects in this blog post.
Project Goals
We’re not done making progress though. In the coming weeks and months we are working to:
- Release the Workbench, Run Control, and Performance Engine code bases to Github.
- Begin to convert the GenevaERS Documentation to a new Github Home.
- Continue to explore potential deeper integration with Apache Spark and GenevaERS, as the Map on the Mainframe component.
Apache Spark Integration: “Map” on the Mainframe Phase
The team continues nearly weekly R&D efforts to explore tighter integration with Apache Spark. GenevaERS has many similarities to the Map-Reduce constructs of Apache Spark, preceding it by a decade or more.
The GenevaERS Extract Engine GVBMR95, is a parallel processing, machine code generation function that can resolve many queries or functions in one pass through the underlying data. The GenevaERS Summarization and Aggregation Engine, GVBMR88, is much more like the reduce phase in Map-Reduce.
The team believes there may be distinct advantages to using the GenevaERS Extract Engine for the Map phase in Map-Reduce, coupled with Apache Spark for the Reduce phase, using its extended functionality and capabilities.
The team holds a weekly R&D Session on most Friday’s at 2:30 EST on webex if you are interested in joining.
Become Involved
Would you like to get more out of your valuable data on z/OS? Consider applying GenevaERS to the problem. Use the GenevaERS e-mail list to start a discussion of the potential use case.
A daily scrum call is held Monday through Thursday at 5:00 EST on webex (not held on TSC meeting days, 2nd and 4th Tuesdays.) Our On Boarding Document will allow you to get connected to all the GenevaERS Resources.
Additionally here are opportunities, many marked in the GenevaERS Repo as Good First Issue, to explore involvement in the GenevaERS Community:
- Editing and improving our website is a space for additional help.
- Join our Apache Spark/Izoda R&D efforts.
- We want to develop a new method for specifying GenevaERS processes, using perhaps Groovy, Gradle or other tooling. Checkout our post on Architectural Direction.
- GenevaERS’s Performance Engine today is executed through z/OS JCL. We would love to convert it to Polycephaly as a launching platform.
We’re excited on our progress, and our prospects. We’d love to have you participate. Thanks for your interest.
