CIQ, the founding support and services partner of Rocky Linux and a leader in high-performance software infrastructure, announced a partnership with NVIDIA to integrate the NVIDIA CUDA Toolkit within its commercial offerings.
According to the companies, this collaboration transforms how the entire industry can access and operationalize GPU acceleration, delivering ready-to-run environments that dramatically reduce complexity, risk, and time-to-value for all performance computing workloads, including AI, machine learning, and HPC.
NVIDIA CUDA is NVIDIA’s accelerated computing platform and programming model that powers major AI and scientific computing breakthroughs. The CUDA Toolkit includes NVIDIA’s optimized libraries and development tools used to develop and deploy NVIDIA accelerated workloads.
Through this native integration, CIQ delivers approved, professionally supported solutions built upon NVIDIA's capabilities, providing enterprises with immediate GPU acceleration while maintaining licensing compliance, the vendors said.
“This partnership is a game-changer for the global HPC and AI ecosystem,” said Gregory Kurtzer, founder and CEO of CIQ. “By integrating native NVIDIA CUDA support into Rocky Linux, we eliminate deployment risks and dramatically cut time-to-production from weeks to minutes. As Rocky Linux sees rapid enterprise adoption worldwide, this collaboration enables faster innovation and reliable GPU performance at scale, from the lab to the data center to the cloud.”
Rocky Linux has established itself as the leading distribution in the Enterprise Linux segment and is prominently featured among NVIDIA’s officially supported Enterprise Linux distributions.
CIQ’s Rocky Linux platform, enabled with CUDA, addresses critical deployment challenges by providing a fully tested, validated, and optimized stack available immediately. This eliminates the need for manual installations or custom integrations that traditionally create deployment delays and misconfiguration risks, the company said.
By removing the technical friction and time delay associated with GPU software deployment, CIQ’s Rocky Linux platform with CUDA reduces the risk of misconfiguration and accelerates time-to-value for commercial AI deployments.
The entire stack is tested, validated, and optimized, shrinking time-to-deployment from weeks to minutes. This significantly reduces the operational burden for teams deploying GPU-accelerated workloads at scale, whether training large language models (LLMs), running inference pipelines, or executing advanced scientific simulations, the companies said.
With a fully validated environment available out-of-the-box or at the click of the button in your favorite cloud, CIQ eliminates the need for manual installs or custom integration, unlocking the full performance of NVIDIA hardware from development to production.
“The CIQ and NVIDIA collaboration is all about empowering users,” said Bjorn Hovland, chief operating officer at CIQ. “By delivering GPU-ready infrastructure with Rocky Linux, we’re eliminating deployment complexity and helping customers extract maximum machine performance and efficiency from day one.”
As part of this collaboration, CIQ will provide prebuilt Rocky Linux with CUDA images through its registries and major cloud marketplaces. These environments ensure consistency, portability, and compliance, streamlining deployment across the entire GPU development lifecycle for organizations in regulated and performance-critical sectors, according to the vendor.
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