CIQ is a company that builds secure, reliable, and open infrastructure solutions at scale, with dedicated support for a range of performance-intensive computing and enterprise technologies. Pulse 2.0 interviewed CIQ founder and CEO Gregory Kurtzer to learn more.
Gregory Kurtzer’s Background
Kurtzer has a long history in High Performance Computing (HPC). And Kurtzer received a degree in biochemistry from the University of California at Berkeley in 1997 and later became an HPC systems architect and technical lead at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, one of the major HPC centers run by the US Department of Energy.
Plus, Kurtzer is an open source advocate and has been identified as “one of the most famous people in the open source community,” having created several large open source projects and communities. These projects include CentOS Linux (formerly Caos Linux), Perceus, Warewulf, Singularity (now Apptainer), and, most recently, Rocky Linux.
In late 2017, Kurtzer left Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory to launch Sylabs, a company that aimed to commercialize the HPC-focused Kubernetes container system with Singularity. In April 2020, Kurtzer became founder and CEO of CIQ, a technology company providing services and support for companies using Rocky Linux as a replacement for CentOS, which is being phased out by Red Hat and will shutdown in July 2024. CIQ emerged from stealth in early 2021 and closed a $26 million Series A funding round in mid-2022.
Formation Of CIQ
How did the idea for CIQ come together? Kurtzer shared:
“CIQ was founded on the idea of modernizing the entire HPC software infrastructure and middleware stack, which has not innovated for nearly 30 years. What makes CIQ unique is how the company leverages capabilities from enterprise, cloud, hyperscale, and HPC to create the next-generation scalable, secure infrastructure. From the base operating system through containers, orchestration, provisioning, computing, and up to cloud applications, CIQ works with every part of the technology stack to drive solutions for customers and communities with stable, scalable, and secure production environments. By working on various levels of the technology stack, CIQ is actively contributing to advancements in enterprise, cloud, and HPC. Our expertise in these fields allows us to offer powerful solutions that benefit a wide range of industries and applications.”
“While we were heads down building the HPC 2.0 stack, Red Hat announced its plans to end-of-life CentOS. That’s when Gregory Kurtzer created Rocky Linux* to achieve the original goals of CentOS as a production-ready, bug-for-bug compatible, downstream version of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL). Rocky Linux is now the fastest-growing Enterprise Linux distribution.“
“At the request of many large organizations and professional IT teams, CIQ offers dedicated world-class support for Rocky Linux and a range of performance-intensive computing and enterprise technologies.
(*Note: Although CIQ is the founding sponsor of Rocky Linux and serves as its primary service partner, the open source project is hosted by the Rocky Enterprise Software Foundation (RESF), which was established to ensure the project’s longevity and community-driven governance).”
Challenges Faced
What’s a notable challenge Kurtzer faced in building CIQ? Kurtzer acknowledged:
“One disturbing trend we see in the ecosystem is that some organizations are making decisions that are contrary to the spirit of open source. CIQ is dedicated to fostering collaborative innovation and ensuring that open source remains truly open. The most recent example of this commitment is that CIQ has joined Oracle and SUSE in forming a collaborative trade association called the Open Enterprise Linux Association (OpenELA). OpenELA seeks to provide a collaborative and open environment where Enterprise Linux source code is accessible, transparent, and available for use by organizations and the broader open source community. Together, we will ensure that the entire open source community has an Enterprise Linux standard that they can rely on as being a true open source and freely distributed capability, just as open source is intended.”
Core Products
What are CIQ’s core products? Kurtzer explained:
“From the base operating system, through containers, orchestration, provisioning, computing, and up to cloud applications, CIQ works with every part of the technology stack to drive solutions for customers and communities with stable, scalable, secure production environments. In doing so, we rely on these core products:
1.) Rocky Linux: Rocky Linux is a free, open-source operating system that is 100% binary compatible with RHEL. Rocky Linux is the fastest-growing Enterprise Linux distribution and is widely adopted in enterprise and HPC environments, as well as by leading cloud providers and hyperscalers.
2.) Apptainer (nee Singularity): Apptainer is a 100% open source, secure, performant application container system designed to be used by non-privileged users on a shared system. Apptainer is an HPC-tailored alternative to Docker, designed to securely execute applications with bare-metal performance while being portable and reproducible, ideal for workloads ranging from small laboratory clusters all the way to massively scalable HPC clusters.
3.) Warewulf: Warewulf is an open-source cluster management and provisioning platform for all types of clusters and is designed to produce secure, scalable, turnkey cluster deployments that are both flexible and easy to use. From small, researcher-run clusters all the way to HPC clusters with tens of thousands of nodes, Warewulf scales both up and down to be easy to deploy, administer, debug, and secure in any clustering environment.
4.) Fuzzball: Fuzzball is a turnkey, hybrid computing infrastructure stack designed to manage the data and compute lifecycle of performance-intensive workloads. Fuzzball combines the best of cloud, hyperscale, and enterprise with that of traditional HPC, resulting in a lower barrier to entry and increased security, supply chain confidence, and scale.
5.) Mountain: Mountain is a hybrid data center management and security platform that offers a complete catalog of standard, fully supported operating system images, containers, and curated packages.
6.) Ascender: Ascender is a platform that provides all of the structure to implement enterprise infrastructure automation via turnkey Ansible playbooks—effectively, securely, and at scale.”
Customer Success Stories
After asking Kurtzer about customer success stories, he cited:
“One CIQ success story is the University of Montana (UM). UM has a top-tier Carnegie classification of R1 (Very High Research Activity). When we met the team at UM, UM had an old operating system based on CentOS that had not been maintained. Nodes were constantly failing without anyone knowing, there was no monitoring, nothing was set up correctly, and the 100 users on the cluster began to dwindle due to poor performance. It was time for a centralized, top-of-the-line cluster that the faculty would feel confident in using.”
“UM entered into a multi-year agreement with CIQ to rebuild its cluster and get it fully functioning. The first year was dedicated to getting the new cluster off the ground and running smoothly. CIQ trained the existing staff to maintain the new system and manage the day-to-day operations and also trained the faculty on how to use the technology.”
“In years two and three, the CIQ Fuzzball product was used to move UM research computing capabilities to the edge.”
“Today, UM’s new cluster is successfully running, and storage for the 800TB of data is being allocated. Zach Rossmuller, CIO of UM, said ‘We needed help improving the efficiency of our research cluster, and the CIQ team has helped us map out a game plan to make it happen faster than we’d imagined and with a sharp eye on project management. We honestly can’t imagine how we could have made so much progress so quickly without them. CIQ handled scope creep better than anyone I’ve ever worked with. They went above and beyond the normal state of work. I love you guys for it. CIQ gave us not only the solutions to problems but also advice and the resources to implement them.’”
“Another CIQ success story is Texas Tech University’s High Performance Computing Center (HPCC). HPCC is always looking for opportunities to save staff time by deploying technologies that increase reliability and decrease time to deliver the service. Their job is to deliver support in ways that empower researchers to do their best work, but their time to do that is at a premium, as it is in most university and lab settings. In adopting any suite of support products, they need to determine whether it will save more staff time in aggregate workload than it will cost them in money. Like many in the HPC run-your-own-cluster field, HPCC’s immediate goal was to find a reliable replacement for CentOS, but they wanted a solution that would extend further, evolving all their technologies with each new version release. In addition, HPCC sought a support team that would help them resolve any issues rapidly so they could achieve their ultimate goal: to maximize the research productivity of the university.”
“HPCC chose the open-source Rocky Linux operating system as a seamless, stable, and secure successor to CentOS. As part of the CIQ HPC software stack that integrates containerization with Apptainer and cluster provisioning with Warewulf to deploy scalable system infrastructure, it allows HPCC to harness the full power of computational resources and easily and efficiently execute critically important performance-intensive workloads. HPCC also engaged CIQ’s escalation support, customization, optimization, integration, and other professional services.”
“To measure the success of its engagement with CIQ, HPCC set qualitative goals that were greatly exceeded. For example, based on a previous experience of upgrading operating systems on headnotes, they put aside four days for the process in a planned shutdown schedule; instead, with the active involvement of the CIQ team, it was accomplished in a little more than a morning, saving significant time and money. HPCC increased up time and minimized staff time, successfully achieving their mission to maximize the university’s research productivity in dollars, the sophistication of technology, papers, and students taught.”
“Alan Sill, Manager Director of HPCC, said, ‘It’s been a good investment of money to spend on the service contracts we have with CIQ. It has accomplished my goals of not just saving staff time but also saving staff time in a way that lets them be more productive on other things. My experience with my staff has been that they can quickly become dismissive of support that they don’t consider to be expert. If they’re calling someone up and they’re getting an answer that they knew already, they will quickly tell me how much of a waste of time that was. That hasn’t happened with the CIQ folks. Every time we’ve come to them with a problem, they’ve delivered a solution. That’s what I was looking for: people who know more than I do.’”
Funding
After asking Kurtzer about the company funding, he revealed CIQ raised Series A funding of $26 million in 2022.
Future Goals
What are some of CIQ’s future company goals? Kurtzer pointed out:
“Our goal is to enable people to do the impossible—to overachieve on their mission—by supporting their engineering needs, research and development, and science. You will see this vision in how we do everything, from providing commercial support to bringing solutions to our customers, and in the way we support the open source community both in computing as well as the broad ecosystem with OpenELA.”
Additional Thoughts
Any other topics to discuss? Kurtzer concluded:
“Taking advantage of modern infrastructure innovations (cloud architecture, hardware such as GPUs, etc.), we must build HPC systems that support not only the historical/legacy use cases but also the next generation of HPC workloads. Fuzzball is a solution that will make HPC approachable for users of all experience levels, providing a modern cloud-native, hybrid, federated infrastructure that will run clusters on-premises and multipremises, in the cloud and multicloud, even in multiple availability regions in multiclouds.”
“A gigantic distributed computing architecture will be stitched together with a single API, offering researchers total flexibility in locality, mobility, gravity, and data security. In addition, we aim to abstract away all the complexity of operation and minimize the steps involved in running HPC workflows.”
