Granite-3.1-8B-Instruct is a 8B parameter long-context instruct model finetuned from Granite-3.1-8B-Base using a combination of open source instruction datasets with permissive license and internally collected synthetic datasets tailored for solving long context problems. This model is developed using a diverse set of techniques with a structured chat format, including supervised finetuning, model alignment using reinforcement learning, and model merging.