Press Release: CIQ Simplifies HPC Deployment With Rocky Linux, Mountain and Ascender

CIQ boosts the University of Montana and Whitman College's research computing efforts, substantially reducing TCO and increasing ROI.

RENO, Nev., Oct. 26, 2023 -- CIQ, the company building the next generation of software infrastructure for enterprises running performance-intensive workloads atop Rocky Linux, today announced the "general availability" of its custom deployment consultation services for setup of HPC environments. Tapping the capabilities of Rocky Linux and Mountain, CIQ streamlines the custom deployment process, delivering a highly performant, scalable and secure HPC stack that is easy to maintain and upgrade.

"We've recently completed custom deployments of HPC stacks with the University of Montana and Whitman College, among others. In each case we strove to help our clients build the HPC stack they would have built themselves, but didn't have to," said Jonathon Anderson, solutions architect manager at CIQ. "CIQ is fully committed to helping others set up their own HPC environment in less time and with greater ease than they might expect. Our goal is to enable organizations to do their best research and innovative development on an HPC platform that they can rely on, easily scale and cost-effectively maintain."

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.

University of Montana

"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. 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." —Zach Rossmiller, CIO of University of Montana

Read the full University of Montana case study here.

Register for the November 8 webinar featuring University of Montana: "Traditional HPC Stack for Advanced Computing."

Whitman College

"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. 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." —David Sprunger, Director of Instructional and Learning Technology, Whitman College

Additional Resources

To inquire about CIQ's custom deployment consultation services for setup of HPC stacks, contact [email protected]