Long-term support, preflight compatibility checks, execution records and cluster image distribution give platform teams a supported path from the open source Apptainer runtime to production.
RENO, Nev., October 8, 2026 – CIQ, the company behind Rocky Linux and the open infrastructure provider the world's leading enterprises companies trust in production, today announced Apptainer Pro, an upcoming commercially supported edition of Apptainer, the container system built for high-performance computing. Apptainer Pro will add long-term maintenance, workload compatibility validation, execution records and efficient image distribution so organizations can run AI training and HPC applications reliably at scale.
Containers now package most AI and HPC applications, yet they were never a sufficient privilege boundary on shared infrastructure. CIQ founder Gregory Kurtzer created Singularity, now Apptainer, at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory to solve that problem. Apptainer runs containers as the user who launches them, with no privileged daemon, and has become the standard at national laboratories and supercomputing centers. As AI-assisted research exposes kernel flaws at record pace and AI workloads scale across shared GPU clusters, platform teams need more than the runtime. They need a maintained release lifecycle, confidence that a container will run on the target hardware, a record of what ran where, and a way to deliver images efficiently across thousands of nodes. Apptainer Pro will deliver that operational layer with an accountable support relationship from CIQ.
"Apptainer was built on the premise that users on a shared system should get the full benefit of containers without gaining privileges they shouldn't have. That premise matters more today than ever. Apptainer Pro will give organizations the lifecycle, validation and traceability to run Apptainer in production, and extend CIQ's support from the operating system with RLC Pro to the application environment." — Gregory Kurtzer, CEO of CIQ and founder of Rocky Linux, Apptainer (formerly Singularity), and Warewulf
Apptainer Pro will deliver designated long-term support releases with backported security and critical bug fixes, signed packages and tested upgrade paths on a predictable schedule. It will also check container requirements against the intended deployment target (GPU type, CUDA or ROCm, and MPI configuration) before a full workload launch, to reduce avoidable job failures and wasted compute. Execution records will connect each workload to its image digest, user, job, runtime and host environment, so teams can identify which images ran on affected hosts when an advisory lands and can produce audit evidence on demand. Reusable OCI-to-SIF conversions, image pre-staging and managed node-local caching will reduce repeated transfers across the cluster. Local mirrors and signed offline updates will support air-gapped and sovereign environments.
CIQ is now accepting early customers for Apptainer Pro, with priority given to organizations moving from Singularity. Wider availability is expected soon, as a standalone subscription or alongside RLC Pro, Warewulf Pro, Ascender Pro and Fuzzball. Because Apptainer Pro builds on open source Apptainer, Singularity users will keep their existing containers and workflows: Apptainer runs the same SIF images and still provides the singularity command. To join the early customer program, visit ciq.com/products/apptainer.