RENO, Nev., May 25, 2023 — CIQ, the company supporting enterprises with the next generation of software infrastructure built atop the Rocky Linux enterprise Linux distribution, announced today that it has certified its suite of software products on recently released Rocky Linux 9.2 and Rocky Linux 8.8. Certified CIQ products include Warewulf and Apptainer as well as the newly launched Fuzzball and images available in the Mountain repo as a service offering. CIQ also announced enterprise grade professional support on both of the new versions of Rocky Linux.

“At CIQ we’re committed to certifying our entire suite of products and advancing our customers’ success by supporting the latest releases of Rocky Linux as soon as possible after they are shared by the Rocky Linux project,” said Gregory Kurtzer, CEO of CIQ and founder of Rocky Linux. “This commitment enables our customers to quickly take advantage of the new features, bug fixes and enhancements in the latest Rocky Linux releases. We congratulate the Rocky Linux and Peridot teams for rapidly building, deploying and testing the newest versions of Rocky Linux to ensure that it is the most stable enterprise operating system ever. The quality and speed of these releases is a tribute to the community of supporters and a benefit to all Rocky Linux users.”

Rocky Linux, created by Kurtzer to replace CentOS, is an open-source enterprise operating system designed to be 100% bug-for-bug compatible with Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Rocky Linux is among the most frequently adopted Linux distributions now that CentOS 8 has been end-of-lifed and CentOS 7 will be end-of-lifed on June 31, 2024.

• The Rocky Linux 9.2 release is currently available for the x86-64, aarch64 and s390x architectures. Read more about the highlights of Rocky Linux 9.2 here.
• The Rocky Linux 8.8 release is currently available for the x86-64 and aarch64 architecture. Learn more about Rocky Linux 8.8 here.

Additionally, CIQ is announcing long term support (LTS) for Rocky 9.2 which will include support for the Federal Information Processing Standards (FIPS). The addition of LTS brings support to CIQ customers for Rocky Linux 9.2 for an additional 18 months, providing support beyond the community edition for customers who need assurance that a trusted partner will be there to support them for a guaranteed time frame.

Supported cloud images for Rocky 9.2 and 8.8 are also immediately available for Oracle Cloud Infrastructure and Google Cloud with Amazon Web Services coming soon.

Newly Released Mountain and Fuzzball Certified on Rocky Linux 9.2 and 8.8

CIQ Mountain, now certified with Rocky Linux 9.2 and 8.8 available images, is a “mountain of solutions” that provides software and artifact delivery and lifecycle management for turnkey solution management and deployment at any scale. Launched earlier this month, CIQ Mountain offers a set of certified and supported assets and turnkey solutions—such as Rocky Linux images, verifiable packages, containers, individual applications, LTS, optimized kernels and microservices with their associated configurations. It also supports private mirroring of these curated assets. CIQ is working to deliver additional capabilities in the near future aimed at securing the supply chain of specific use cases or segments, including academic research, commercial simulation and life sciences. Each of these is aimed at helping organizations drive towards their infrastructure management and security goals with less effort and risk associated with managing vital compute resources.

CIQ Fuzzball, launched last week, combines the best of enterprise tooling with the latest in modern Performance Intensive Computing (PIC) technology. Fuzzball unites these rapidly converging use cases by providing a single platform that deftly combines the best of both worlds into an entirely new PIC paradigm that CIQ calls “HPC 2.0.” The software offers a turnkey, Kubernetes-based, hybrid computing infrastructure stack that empowers users with more control, administrators with more reach, and organizations with more productivity. It manages the data and compute lifecycle of performance-intensive workloads in hybrid cloud environments, allowing scientists, researchers and analysts to easily develop and execute their critical workloads anywhere to optimize resources and performance. CIQ Fuzzball is now certified to run on Rocky Linux 9.2 and 8.8.

Support for CIQ Fuzzball

Sandia National Laboratories is a Fuzzball user that deploys the software as part of the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA)/Advanced Simulation and Computing (ASC) Program, established by Congress in 2000. NNSA is a semi-autonomous agency within the U.S. Department of Energy responsible for enhancing national security through the military application of nuclear science. Essential to this mission is the ASC program’s high-performance simulation and computing capabilities that inform critical stockpile stewardship decisions of the Office of Defense Programs.

“Under the Vanguard program we are tasked with investigating emerging technologies, hardware or software that can be applied to the NNSA/ASC mission,” said James Laros, distinguished member of technical staff, Sandia National Laboratories. “We are working with CIQ to evaluate the workload orchestration capabilities provided by Fuzzball and how this enables expanded capabilities for Sandia and the NNSA, especially in regard to leveraging various new technologies as part of a heterogeneous platform.”

About CIQ

CIQ powers the next generation of software infrastructure, uniting capabilities from enterprise, cloud, hyperscale and HPC to create the best-in-class software stack. 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. CIQ is the founding support and services partner of Rocky Linux, the Rocky Enterprise Software Foundation (RESF), and the creator of the next generation federated computing stack.

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Source: CIQ