In less than one week, HPC’ers from around the globe will gather in Dallas for Supercomputing 2022. CIQ is using this show as a major launchpad for showcasing why we believe CIQ will drive innovation throughout the HPC community. We will feature our involvement in the Rocky Linux, Apptainer, and Warewulf communities, and we’ll be able to chat about options for professional support and services around those projects. We’ll be highlighting our involvement with partners across the HPC ecosystem, including efforts with the OpenRadioss community. We’re also going to start unveiling Fuzzball, which we see as the march towards a new era of getting HPC work done.

Rocky Linux

SC22’s theme this year is “HPC accelerates,” and it fits well with Rocky Linux! The “rocket ship” of an OS is continuing its momentum within the HPC ecosystem, filling the void left by the sudden departure of CentOS. We’ve been tracking Rocky Linux growth data, and the data looks good! You can drop by to see the data yourself because, frankly, we’re happy to show it.

You can also chat with us about securing support of Rocky Linux from CIQ. Want to use the kernel from mainline instead of the one from LTS? We can help with that. We’ll also have people at the show who can talk to you about moving from another OS to Rocky Linux. Are you still running CentOS and worried about where to go next? You would do well to drop by and have a chat with us.

Apptainer

Containerization isn’t new to HPC, and technically, Apptainer isn’t new either. Apptainer is the new name for the original Singularity project which provided containerization for HPC applications. The project moved under The Linux Foundation and was renamed to Apptainer since the last SC show. It’s continued to grow as more HPC’ers are looking at containerization of applications. Apptainer provides key elements for HPC, including advanced fabrics support that is needed for our multi-node, tightly coupled workloads. It also has security features baked in, and provides cryptographically signed packages to be moved around in a zero trust environment.

Our experts will be on hand to discuss containerization, and we’ll even have a couple of talks about how we used Apptainer to containerize OpenRadioss. If you are looking to containerize applications for your specific environment, you can discuss the support options with us around Apptainer.

Warewulf

A stalwart of cluster provisioning, Warewulf keeps marching along with features and innovations that help keep pace with HPC cluster environments. CIQ continues to help drive these innovations and support the Warewulf community. Notably, the latest Warewulf includes features that allow compute node images to be delivered to Warewulf as containers. How interesting…if only we knew someone who was also good with containerization... 

Why should you care? Managing the compute node images is no trivial task, and it can be critical to maintaining systems in good working order. Warewulf provides plenty of features to help deploy and maintain clusters. 

As expected by now, you can also talk to us about support for Warewulf and options to help you get good mileage from your cluster resources.

You may also be connecting some dots here, between Rocky, Apptainer, and Warewulf. Keeping pace with all the technologies these days is daunting. It’s a mountain of a problem, and if you catch me at SC22, I might be able to give you some details of how CIQ can help you address it.

Fuzzball

Then there’s Fuzzball, a cloudy way to approach HPC environments. Fuzzball takes its inspiration from Enterprise and HPC without being tied to the approach of either. Someone named Greg K., no, wait, that’s too obvious, let’s call him G. Kurtzer…G. Kurtzer likes to call it HPC 2.0. So, you can drop by our booth and talk to us about HPC 2.0. Fuzzball will help abstract complexities of HPC systems and move towards push-button execution of workflows. We have the ambition to use Fuzzball as the vehicle to change the game for HPC use. Fuzzball will help users across academia and industry tap into the resources they need as “HPC accelerates.”

Find Us at SC22

Come see us at booth #521 to meet our in-house experts, ask questions, and see live demos of Rocky Linux, Apptainer, Warewulf, and Fuzzball. Want one-on-one time with our CIQ staff? Book a meeting with our technical experts to learn about traditional HPC, HPC 2.0, Rocky Linux, and more. If you’re not attending SC22 and would like to chat, you can send us an email and we’ll get right back to you.