IBM z / Master contest results

From mid-October to late January, IBM, together with universities and educational organizations in the z / Universities program, held a z / Master competition dedicated to programming for IBM mainframes and working with the DB2 database system - we want to talk about how this useful event went and who, as a result, turned out to be the winner of the IBM competition, at the same time having gained valuable experience that is not so easy to find.

Over the 5 years that z / Master has been doing, tens of thousands of students from different countries around the world, from North and South America, to Europe and Asia, have participated in it. Our students received the first opportunity to take part in z / Master two years ago, and today both Ukrainian and Kazakh students can try their hand at IBM's free educational courses.

This year, all three prizes were taken by students from Russia, moreover, from one university, this is MSTU. N.E. Bauman: Alexey Mayants, Denis Sorokin and Viktor Smirnov. Besides them, there is one student from Ukraine (Sevastopol National Technical University) - Dmitry Kuzmenko, who was also noted by the z / Master jury. The entire competition, stretching over several months, took place in three rounds, and all tasks were performed on real equipment in the remote access mode.

As all z / Master participants know, IBM is holding this competition for the sake of one goal — to provide students with specialized knowledge that can help in finding and determining their future career. And for this, it is not necessary to participate in the “competition” itself, because the whole z / Master is designed in such a way that each participant can receive training in working with mainframes, sufficient for a deeper mastering of these skills.
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Here is what the winner of the contest, Aleksey Mayants, says: “I participated in the z / Master contest for the third time. This is a great opportunity for students, many of whom might not have heard of such a system before, to get acquainted with mainframes and z / OS. It is important that if you want to continue exploring System z, you can take the official test and become a certified mainframe specialist. As part of the IBM Academic Program, students can get this certification for free. ”

On March 22, a solemn ceremony of awarding the winners took place in Moscow - four young people who showed their best from the whole z / Master. All the rest had the opportunity to get acquainted with IBM mainframes, get relevant training materials and gain skills in working with fault-tolerant servers.

The z / Master IBM competition is held as part of the IBM Academic Initiative program, which involves working with leading scientific researchers, talented teachers and students. IBM members are given access to a wide range of corporate resources that can be used during classes with students and when conducting non-commercial research in the field of computer science and computer science.

Previously published announcement of the competition in the blog IBM.