Gregory M. Kurtzer
Background
My career started in the mid-1990's with a degree in biochemistry and astrong passion for open source software and Linux. Coupling thesedisplinces landed me squarely in High Performance Computing (HPC) where I'vespent well over two decades working with scientists and researchers to solvesome of the hardest and biggest computational problems ever.
While in this role I also created several widely utilized open sourceprojects that even furthered my ability to help support scientificinnovation.
In 2017 I left the DOE to further enable both researchers as well as enterprise organizations and I have now founded and led two companiesas CEO, Sylabs and now CIQ.
Open Source Projects
OpenELA
OpenELA is a non-profit trade association including CIQ, Oracle, and SuSE. Thegoal is to ensure the longevity and continunity of Enterpise Linux such thatdownstream derivitives can always provide a stable community based solution.
Rocky Linux
Due to a recent shift in direction, Centos Linux is no longer a viable alternativefor many organizations and enterprises (including my own needs). So I startedanother Linux distribution targetted at solving the same problem that Centoswas designed to solve.
Singularity / Apptainer
In 2015-2016, containers were all the rage and thety took the industry by storm.Unfortunately, containers were not well supported in HPC environments for a varietyof reasons. I set out to solve this problem and created Singularity. Within 6-9months from the initial release, Singularity was being used across the entirecomputing industry because it solved such a massive pain point.
In 2021 I moved Singularity into the Linux Foundation and per their request, theproject was renamed to Apptainer.
Perceus
Warewulf took a brief hiatus while I further developed it's provisioningfunctions under a new project (Perceus) and a corporate umbrella. After Ifinished developing Perceus it was determined that the best path forward isto continue with Warewulf using an open source (BSD) license under thefunding of Lawrence Berkeley National Labratory.
Centos
Centos came from the Caos Foundation (which I started in 2002) andinitially Centos was destined to be a build platform for the new RPM basedcommunity maintained distribution Caos Linux. When it was designed to bereleased to the public, it was originally coined as Caos-EL (EnterpriseLinux) and it was renamed publicly in December 2003 to what it is knownas today.
After founding the project I led it until 2005 and I was responsible forall of it's initial leadership, management, public outreach and partnershipsduring that period. Due to legal, political, and severely less then excellentpeople, I was forced to relinquish leadership of the project to someone inthe UK (where it stayed until the core developers were able to regain controlof the project). Theremight be some very entertaining stories to beshared over dinner and drinks among friends...
Before Red Hat killed off the project, CentOS was one of the most utilizedenterprise focused operating systems used across the ecosystem.
Warewulf
Warewulf is a scalable systems management suite originally developed to managelarge high-performance Linux clusters. Focused on general scalable systemsmanagement, it includes a framework for system configuration, management,provisioning/installation, monitoring, event notification, and more via amodular plugin architecture. Install the components and features you need orleverage the existing system configurations stored within Warewulf to createcustom solutions to meet your particular needs.