CIQ uses this booth conversation to show how its stack ties together Rocky Linux from CIQ, the Rocky Linux for AI (RLC-AI) variant, and tools such as Warewulf provisioning, Fuzzball workflow orchestration, Ascender automation and Apptainer containers into a coherent platform for performance-intensive computing, from traditional HPC clusters to GPU-centric AI workloads. The interview explains how CIQ builds on the community Rocky Linux distribution while adding enterprise support, tuned kernels, curated userspace and AI-ready container images for customers who want a consistent base OS across on-prem and cloud resources, with more details at https://ciq.com/products/rocky-linux/ai/
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A key part of the story is the relationship between CIQ, Rocky Linux and the Rocky Enterprise Software Foundation (RESF). Rocky Linux remains a community-governed, bug-for-bug compatible enterprise Linux aligned with the RHEL ecosystem, while CIQ acts as founding sponsor and delivers a commercially supported RLC line with validated updates, SLAs and indemnification for production workloads. ([Rocky Linux][1]) On top of that, RLC-AI extends Rocky Linux with NVIDIA CUDA, drivers and AI frameworks, and CIQ recently became the first Linux distribution authorized to ship the complete NVIDIA AI software stack, positioning Rocky Linux from CIQ as a standard base layer for model training, tuning and inference in data-center environments.
Jonathan Anderson then dives into Warewulf (the “Werewolf” he demos), a stateless bare-metal provisioning system that can turn racks of idle servers into a functioning HPC cluster by building OS images, pushing them to nodes and handling per-node customization without relying on local disks. ([warewulf.org][3]) At Supercomputing 2025 in St Louis he explains how CIQ productizes this as Warewulf Pro, adding node image catalogs and a web interface, and notes that Warewulf Pro has just been recognized in the HPCwire awards as users push for horizontal scaling and clearer patterns for managing state on large clusters; even the green Rocky Linux cowboy hats and the pedaflop party references serve as reminders that this is very much a live, growing operator community around that infrastructure.
From there the conversation moves to Fuzzball, CIQ’s container-centric workflow engine for performance-intensive computing, which lets the same pipeline run on-prem, across multiple clusters or in cloud environments while abstracting the underlying schedulers and resources. ([CIQ][4]) Anderson cites customer work such as bioinformatics and RNA sequencing, where Fuzzball Federate can unify heterogeneous resources and has been credited with 100× throughput improvements at FYR’s precision-medicine platform, while Ascender provides Ansible-based orchestration for system lifecycle tasks and Apptainer delivers HPC-friendly containerization rooted in the Singularity heritage for secure, reproducible workloads.
The last part of the booth tour focuses on Rocky Linux from CIQ for AI (RLCI / RLC-AI) and why CIQ can show measurable performance gains over generic enterprise builds: CIQ tracks newer upstream kernels, enables AI-oriented configuration options, recompiles key user-space components for modern micro-architectures and pre-integrates CUDA, PyTorch, TensorFlow and ONNX tooling so AI and HPC teams can start from an optimized baseline rather than hand-tuning each node. ([CIQ][2]) Rocky Linux itself continues to support x86, Arm, Power and RISC-V architectures, but the current RLC-AI focus is on x86 GPUs, with ARM on the roadmap, and the conversations at SC25 revolve around scaling Warewulf beyond single-server deployments, tightening workflow integration with Fuzzball and expanding this open-source-first ecosystem into a more complete, production-ready AI and HPC roadmap.
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