CIQ Simplifies HPC Deployment With Rocky Linux, Mountain, and Ascender

October 26, 2023

CIQ is officially launching the “general availability” of our custom deployment consultation services to help organizations set up their own HPC environments. We have streamlined the deployment process, tapping the capabilities of Rocky Linux and Mountain, to deliver a highly performant, scalable, and secure HPC stack that is easy to maintain and upgrade.

CIQ’s unique approach to HPC setup services

CIQ delivers its custom deployment consultation services for HPC setups with several distinct benefits:

Solutions based on open source: CIQ’s solutions include Rocky Linux, now the world’s most widely adopted Enterprise Linux distribution; Warewulf for managing compute nodes and other clustered resources; Apptainer, containers for HPC; and the Ascender automation platform. Together, these form the market-leading traditional HPC approach for building, managing, and running clusters.
Lifecycle management with Mountain: CIQ offers simplified infrastructure management and enhanced security with its repository of artifacts called Mountain. Mountain provides streamlined access to the growing catalog of CIQ-supported product releases.
Hardware agnostic: CIQ offers HPC setup services on clients’ existing hardware, regardless of manufacturer, freeing clients to use the hardware of their choice and avoid vendor lock-in. CIQ can also help work with vendors, or as part of an RFP process, to design a system to support clients’ research and development goals.
No “black box” services: CIQ is open and transparent in its consultative approach so that clients are fully aware of what is being done each step of the way.
Training for self-sufficiency: In addition to offering enterprise-grade support services for long-term support, CIQ offers in-depth training services to help organizations equip their IT teams for self-sufficiency, if they prefer.

CIQ reduces TCO and increases ROI for University of Montana and Whitman College

Recently, CIQ completed custom deployment of HPC stacks with the University of Montana and Whitman College, amongst others. In each case, we strove to help our clients build the HPC stack they would have built themselves—but didn’t have to.

Zach Rossmiller, CIO of the University of Montana, explains why the high stakes made them seek out CIQ’s assistance: “Equipping our researchers at the University of Montana with the computing resources they need to do their best work is paramount to furthering our institutional mission. We needed help improving the efficiency of our research cluster, so that our researchers had a reliable, secure, high-performance infrastructure they could count on.”

According to Rossmiller, “The CIQ team helped us map out a game plan to make it happen, faster than we’d imagined possible and with a sharp eye on project management. CIQ gave us not only the solutions to problems but also advice and the resources to implement them.”

CIQ also worked closely with Whitman College to help them set up their own HPC environment in less time and with greater ease than they expected. David Sprunger, director of instructional and learning technology, shares why they reached out to CIQ: “Whitman College wanted to get into the HPC game to support the teaching and scholarship efforts of our faculty and students, and we naively thought it would just be connecting a couple of servers together. We were very wrong, and we got pretty lost.”

Whitman College is extremely satisfied with the partnership. Sprunger shares: “We cannot overstate how fortunate and happy we were to discover CIQ. From our very first ‘help!’ phone call, they have been welcoming and incredibly approachable, and demonstrated incredible expertise, flexibility, reliability and speed in getting our HPC cluster up and running. CIQ’s assistance throughout all phases of the project was invaluable. These people are not merely consultants we’re paying; they’re true partners who we hope to collaborate with for a long, long time."

To find out more about CIQ’s custom deployment consultation services for setup of HPC stacks, contact info@ciq.com. And if you’d like to learn more about the University of Montana’s experience, you can read the full case study here.