From CentOS to AI Infrastructure: Empowering the Next Generation of Compute

Hi, everyone. Welcome back here to Techstrong TV. Our next guest up in the box is Gregory Kurtzer.

Greg Kurtzer, founder, CEO of CIQ. He's also the founder of Rocky Linux and Apptainer, and he's done a bunch of other things in his life. Let's hear all about it.

Hey, Greg, welcome back to Techstrong TV, man. It's good to see you. Good to see you again as well, Alan.

Mm-hmm. I gave you the big build-up there, but give people the Greg Kurtzer story. Well, let's see.

My background started off in biochemistry, and ended up getting really interested in open source and Linux and whatnot. And what do you do when you're kind of stuck between science and computers? Well, I ended up in high-performance computing.

Spent a number of years working for the US Department of Energy, building up giant supercomputing systems and working with scientists to really help them with their computational workloads and resources. Absolutely. I remember the story.

But you are entrepreneurial as well, right? And I mentioned not only are you the founder of CIQ, and we're going to get into CIQ in a moment, but I feel like we should start with, let's talk about Rocky and let's talk about Apptainer. Absolutely.

So while I was at the US Department of Energy, as I said, I was really helping scientists, helping researchers do their science, and created a bunch of open source projects. The first big one that I created was a little operating system called CentOS. And that was part of an amazing team that we built up, something that kind of completely changed the industry.

And so from that, as CIQ kind of started maturing, and we were founded on the idea of building a computational platform, kind of modernizing high-performance computing and driving AI and whatnot. But while we were heads down doing that, we had CentOS that was end of lifed. And so I raised my hand to the world, and in about six weeks, we had 10,000 new followers, new people who wanted to be part of this project, and contributors.

And Rocky Linux was born. Really? Huh.

Interesting. Well, I knew this story, but it's good for people out there to hear it, right? And of course, for my friends out there who are Linux aficionados, or maybe not- ...

the whole idea about CentOS and Red Hat and how it works with the major cloud providers and how this led to Rocky kind of branching out for people who wanted something different than where CentOS was headed and everything else and what Red Hat was doing with it. And I'm not here to rehash that, in all honesty, right? But Greg, let's fast-forward over to CIQ.

So CIQ, as I mentioned, was founded on this idea of let's build a more modern computing platform. And we were founded to modernize the HPC ecosystem, which is using an architecture that's about 30 years old at this point. And while that architecture has been incredibly impactful to science and researchers, it's getting to the point where it's a little long in the tooth, and it's starting to hold back- It's long in the tooth.

It's starting to hold back some newer types of applications, newer types of workloads, and holding back research in a variety of ways. Now, again, I want to reiterate, it's still a very impactful architecture, but as we're looking at more modern types of doing compute, things like AI and ML and really driving things like inferencing, we're starting to see that infrastructure being a little bit not as well-equipped to handle that. So we built a platform called FuzzBall, and FuzzBall is directly designed to be that more modern interface.

So researchers, whether you're focusing on AI, whether you're focusing on data science, or you're focusing on the traditional simulation and modeling, FuzzBall is a more modern and better way to implement that. And now we have it actually to the point where if you want to run any AI workflows, any computational workflows or inferencing, it's just a push button away. Super simple.

But while we were building this, we also had this change in the ecosystem, which affected us and affected the world at large. And overnight, as I mentioned, Rocky Linux was born. And from there, we kind of became a Linux operating system vendor almost overnight.

And so we had to grow our vision a little bit and make sure that we were providing all the capabilities and all the needs that our customers demanded. It's interesting, right? Because look, this isn't about knocking anybody's Linux distro or any people who are pushing a particular flavor of Linux.

The fact of the matter is, as you said, it is 30-plus years old, or coming up on 30 year-- Actually, it is 30-plus years old, Linux now, right? When did Linux- Oh, Linux is definitely... Yeah.

Yeah. It has to be closer to maybe 35 even, I bet you. Maybe more.

But anyway, they've done a remarkable job of keeping Linux at the top of the mountain, right? And one could make the argument macOS is just another distribution of it, in many ways, right? " Yeah.

And you can think about them, Red Hat and SUSE and Canonical. I have three off the top of my head, CIQ. And there's more.

But wait, there's more, right? Yeah. And they have had a remarkable run.

They have made Linux the OS of choice for enterprise servers, for high-powered computing. It never really got to the desktop as we always thought it was coming, but it never really took off at the desktop like we thought. But for everything else, it's certainly been just a steamroller, right?

But now, I think we all agree we're in a new world, Greg, right? We're in a new era. We haven't seen this kind of disruption maybe since the internet itself went commercial, or maybe even before that.

And it may take more than a few Band-Aids to keep this puppy running as fast as we need to run. And I think that's what this is really about. The other thing about it, though, and I've written about it, is in a world where we all feel like we can build anything- ...

why do we need your version of anything when I can make my version of anything, right? And that is something that's affecting the whole open source community. It's affecting how we build software, how we're using repos, right?

Is AI going to be net net more open source or net net less open source? All valid questions. Take your pick, start, and run with them, Greg.

So, you made a couple of really amazing points there. And, the first one I want to reiterate, I do also believe that AI is such a big shift on the ecosystem that it is probably the most disruptive technology we've had since the internet. And, the way LLMs now can absolutely write code from scratch.

We're seeing now binaries are able to be transcribed, and you can recapitulate entire software programs and platforms using AI. And we're seeing AI just completely changing the ecosystem overnight. And so the questions that it raises for me are things like, is AI going to end up getting to the point where it's writing a new operating system?

It's building custom things, custom aspects from scratch, specific for particular sites. And where it leads me to think through is what the most important thing when we're talking about core foundational technologies and infrastructure has to do with standards. It has to do with compatibility.

It has to do with meeting expectations. So, for example, Enterprise Linux is Enterprise Linux not because it's a different just version of Linux, and it's not because other Linux distributions can't operate in the enterprise. It is a set of standards and compatibility that people can expect.

And in an age where things are changing faster than ever, having that level of stability in your platform and having that ability to standardize and to ensure that things are going to work as expected are going to help not only vendors, not only software distributors, but also the users. Because they're going to want to know that their applications are going to run as best as they can. And that's really why we developed RLC Pro.

So RLC is Rocky Linux from CIQ, and RLC Pro is how we bundle in enterprise-capable features all into a single platform that users, and companies, and organizations can leverage and know that it's going to work. They're going to know that it has the appropriate levels of standardization going across applications as well as hardware platforms and accelerators, such that everything, again, is just going to work. From your AI workloads to your high-performance workloads to your high-security needs and compliance, everything now is included in RLC Pro.

As we said before, this isn't just another enterprise Linux distro. This is really something that's really optimized for today's workloads, for today's stack, if you will. And there's a lot of talk, right, about building the AI stack, right?

Whether you're Jensen Huang at NVIDIA, using Cuder and all these things, or you're the Cloud Native Computing Foundation talking about Kubernetes. Everyone is vying to own that AI stack, this new compute stack that we're going to be using. More for inference than training, probably, but still an AI stack.

I haven't heard anyone say that should run on Windows and no disrespect to Windows, but I haven't heard anyone say, that should run on Windows as the OS. Yeah. I think it's a givenAnd if I'm wrong, correct me, that there's Linux under there somewhere, at that OS level.

But last year's, five years ago's Linux isn't going to help us. And I think that's the issue here. With all of the innovations coming out of accelerators, coming out of chipsets and hardware platforms, we have to keep up.

We have to make sure that if somebody goes out and buys hundreds of thousands of dollars or millions of dollars worth of GPUs, we have to ensure that the operating system is ready to operate those GPUs and ready to run those GPUs efficiently and de-risk that investment in such a way that the users know, they know for a fact, that it's not only going to work, but that they're going to get the performance that they're trying to buy, that they're trying to acquire. And so RLC Pro does that. And we have partnerships with the leading GPU vendors out there.

NVIDIA, we've been very public about our great relationship with NVIDIA. We have a fantastic relationship with AMD, and we are taking the capabilities and the optimizations that we are able to develop by ourselves as well as in conjunction with these other vendors to ensure that, again, not only does everything work, but everything is de-risked, such that you can just install it and run it and it'll work. That's the key piece of it.

I really do. So is this available now, Greg, or it's coming? No, it's available.

Well, how do we get it? com. And from there, we are building everything from a self-serve portal, so you can go and log in and get these capabilities and these Linux distributions and optimizations for free.

Or you can reach out to us. And if you are working at a large organization and you want to scale that up and you want to build very large resources with this, we're here to help. So just reach out to us and anything you need, we're there for you.

I love it. Hey, I got another question that just popped in my head, though. We're hearing so much of computing at the edge and AI at the edge.

I want to host AI myself and not run the tokens up and everything else. Is the CIQ Linux and RLC Pro AI, as well as RLC Pro, the right OS for that? AI on the edge.

I got guys here running Mac Minis with OpenClore and stuff on it, right? Yeah. So you said something earlier that I thought was fantastic, which is Linux has become pervasive.

It is everywhere. Whether you're running it on the edge, whether you're running it on your cell phone, whether it's your refrigerator or microwave or car that's running it, all the way to your core enterprise infrastructure, servers, and compute requirements. AI and Linux at this point are going to be everywhere.

Well, AI's going to be everywhere. Linux is already everywhere. So how do we help enable people that are looking to implement AI, that are looking to no longer pay for their tokens because they want to run it locally?

How do we enable that? And RLC AI definitely helps with that by making sure that everything's going to run out of the box. But this is going back now to FuzzBall and what we've built with FuzzBall.

And FuzzBall is going to become your push button, just click, I want to run my coding agents locally. I want to run my inferencing locally. I want to run my RAG database with my own company data all embedded into it with local models.

FuzzBall is able to wrap all that up into a single interface, a single control plane, and make it super, super easy. I think we gave everyone the sites and places to go do this. Hey, man, come back and keep us posted because this stuff is changing so quickly.

I'm really looking forward to seeing what we got here. Alan, it's always great to talk with you. Great to see you again.

Thank you for having me. Good to see you. All right.

We're going to take a break here on Techstrong TV. We're going to be back in a second. Go check out Rocky Linux.

If you want cutting edge Linux of what's happening, the latest, it's always good to check out what Rocky's doing. Greg, I'll be in touch. Be well.