Inside the DGX Spark benchmarks for RLC Pro AI
See how we reproduced the DGX Spark community leaderboard on Rocky Linux with CIQ's kernel, and how to rerun it on your own Spark.
From Samba to post-quantum cryptography: Jeremy Allison’s open source journey
Meet CIQ Distinguished Engineer Jeremy Allison and explore his journey from Samba to FIPS compliance, open source security, and post-quantum cryptography.
Upgrade, update, or migration? Why getting it wrong wrecks your timeline
A conversion and a rebuild are different projects. Know which one you're planning.
Patch PHP2Shell now and prepare for the next AI-found CVE
Six months ago, I wrote that vulnerabilities were going to come in waves. I undersold it. In April and May, Copy Fail, Dirty Frag, Fragnesia and CIFSwitch hit the Linux kernel. Researchers have kept…
Diagnose failed jobs and re-prioritize queued work in place with Fuzzball
Fuzzball names the failed rank in multi-node jobs, re-prioritizes queued work in place, and puts compute policy grants and deletion in the CLI.
An insurance claims arbitration provider moves off Chef to commercially supported Ansible with Ascender Pro
A $50M+ nonprofit arbitration provider handling almost $27 billion a year in insurance claims filings replaced Chef with Ascender Pro ahead of the Chef Infra Server end of life, and now runs event-driven remediation, audit-ready reporting, and one control plane across a 650-node on-premises and Azure environment.
A hyperscale GPU cloud provider keeps fleet automation moving with Ascender Pro
A $5B+ hyperscale GPU cloud provider runs its fleet automation, spanning thousands of AMD and NVIDIA nodes and 2.5 million executions a month, on Ascender Pro and Ascender Ledger, with a drop-in Helm migration and real-time compliance and change tracking.
A European telecom operator standardizes a three-tier carrier network on RLC Pro
A European telecom operator, part of a $15B+ global technology group, runs a three-tier Open RAN carrier network, spanning thousands of bare metal servers and hundreds of edge clusters, on RLC Pro with a certified, pinned kernel, CIQ Bridge on legacy CentOS hosts, and a multi-year migration on its own timeline.
A university research computing team recovers a failed node in 30 minutes with Warewulf Pro
The research computing team at a $1.3B+ U.S. research university cut compute-node recovery to about 30 minutes and ended dependency chases for a few hundred researchers by standardizing its 222-node cluster on RLC Pro, Warewulf Pro, and Apptainer.
Get more AI speed from your DGX Spark with RLC Pro AI
See how RLC Pro AI did on three Spark Arena tests on a NVIDIA DGX Spark, then set up the same host and rerun every test yourself, step by step.
RLC Pro AI delivers top AI performance on NVIDIA DGX Spark with Enterprise Linux stability
CIQ optimizes RLC Pro AI for DGX Spark with the newest long-term kernel and NVIDIA drivers, so the same Enterprise Linux runs from prototype to production. RENO, Nev., October 15, 2026 \- CIQ, the…
What a correct answer costs on a Strix Halo depends on how hard the question is
I measured 27 local LLMs on a Strix Halo with a power meter. The cheapest model for easy questions costs 37x more once questions get hard.
Browse by product
What each product in the CIQ portfolio is for, and the briefs, guides, and portal links that go with it. Expand a product to see the detail.
OS Layer
CIQ's free tier, with variants purpose-built for major hardware ecosystems.
- RLC+ NVIDIA includes the complete NVIDIA AI and networking stack validated and ready out-of-the-box with CUDA Toolkit and DOCA-OFED pre-integrated, eliminating hours of driver setup before a single GPU-accelerated job runs.
- RLC+ AMD, coming soon, delivers AMD Instinct GPU drivers and ROCm support pre-integrated.
When requirements extend to LTS, FIPS validation, production SLOs, and indemnification, that is where RLC Pro begins.
A complete rethinking of what an Enterprise Linux vendor owes its customers. RLC Pro provides direct bug fixes, committed CVE timelines, Long-Term Support, and FIPS 140-3 as an all-inclusive subscription with no inventory tracking. Every enterprise requirement is treated as a baseline, not an add-on: binary compatibility, security, update SLAs, FIPS validation, indemnification, and support from engineers who helped build Rocky Linux.
A security-hardened variant of RLC Pro preconfigured for high-compliance environments. Ships 95%+ DISA STIG and 99% CIS compliant at first boot, no manual configuration required. Active defense is embedded directly in the OS: Linux Kernel Runtime Guard (LKRG) detects exploitation as it occurs, not after. Hardened memory allocator, hardened glibc and OpenSSH, cryptographically signed packages, and an SBOM per image provide layered protection against entire classes of vulnerabilities before they are known or disclosed.
Built with an AI-first mindset from the kernel layer up. The CIQ Linux Kernel (CLK), CUDA Toolkit, and DOCA-OFED ship commercially authorized and pre-integrated: drivers, kernel modules, and runtime dependencies validated together before release. PyTorch and vLLM combinations tested per release. The same validated stack runs identically on bare-metal, AWS, GCP, Azure, and sovereign on-premises infrastructure. Secure Boot, Confidential Computing, and a per-image SBOM included as standard.
Orchestration Layer
A cloud-native workload orchestration platform for AI and HPC that keeps data, models, and computation on infrastructure you control. Fuzzball unifies model training, fine-tuning, validation, and inference in a single portable workflow: on-premises, in the cloud, or hybrid. Integrates with existing Slurm and PBS Professional deployments.
Enterprise-grade stateless cluster provisioning. Warewulf Pro manages the full lifecycle of bare-metal compute nodes via a web UI. Nodes boot from a known image every time, so configuration drift does not accumulate and new clusters deploy in days rather than weeks.
Enterprise infrastructure automation built on AWX. Ascender Pro delivers workflow orchestration, configuration management, compliance reporting, and drift remediation at fleet scale. CVE dashboards and exportable audit records are generated as a byproduct of normal operations, not a separate staff project.
The leading open-source container runtime for HPC and scientific computing. Apptainer runs containers without root privileges and integrates natively into shared, multi-tenant cluster environments where Docker is not appropriate.
Platform Tools
A compatibility bridge enabling organizations to run RHEL-certified software on Rocky Linux without requalification. CIQ Bridge closes the gap between upstream Rocky Linux and certified enterprise software ecosystems, and provides a migration path from CentOS 7.
A searchable catalog of software and hardware verified compatible with CIQ's product portfolio. C3 gives architects and procurement teams a trusted reference for validated integrations, reducing evaluation risk when building on the CIQ stack.
The central hub for CIQ product access. Organizations use the CIQ Portal to manage licenses, download ISOs and installers, access documentation, and evaluate products before purchase, from a developer license to an enterprise trial to full production deployment.
Installation guides, configuration references, and release notes for every CIQ product, including FIPS certification status for RLC Pro. The canonical source engineers reach for once a product is deployed.
Troubleshooting articles, how-tos, and known-issue write-ups from CIQ's support engineers. Searchable answers to the questions customers actually open tickets about.