NVIDIA Acquires SchedMD to Strengthen Open-Source HPC and AI Workload Management with Slurm
NVIDIA has announced the acquisition of SchedMD, the leading developer of Slurm, an open-source workload management system widely used in high-performance computing (HPC) and artificial intelligence. The move aims to strengthen the open-source software ecosystem and accelerate innovation in AI and HPC across research institutions, developers, and enterprises. Under the acquisition, NVIDIA will continue to develop and distribute Slurm as open-source, vendor-neutral software, ensuring broad accessibility and support across diverse hardware and software environments. Slurm is a critical tool for managing complex, parallel workloads in large-scale computing clusters, where efficient scheduling and resource allocation are essential for performance and scalability. As the most widely adopted job scheduler in the HPC world, Slurm powers more than half of the top 10 and top 100 systems on the TOP500 list of supercomputers. Its capabilities in handling large-scale, policy-driven workloads make it indispensable for training and running generative AI models, with major foundation model developers and AI builders relying on it to manage model training and inference. Danny Auble, CEO of SchedMD, expressed enthusiasm about the acquisition, calling it a validation of Slurm’s pivotal role in the world’s most demanding computing environments. He emphasized that NVIDIA’s deep expertise in accelerated computing will further advance Slurm’s development while preserving its open-source nature and neutrality. NVIDIA has maintained a long-standing collaboration with SchedMD for over a decade. Going forward, the company will continue investing in Slurm’s evolution to meet the growing demands of next-generation AI and supercomputing. The acquisition will also expand access to new systems, enabling users of NVIDIA’s accelerated computing platforms to optimize workloads across their entire infrastructure. NVIDIA will support heterogeneous computing environments, allowing customers to run mixed hardware clusters with the latest Slurm features. The company will maintain its commitment to open-source support, offering training, development resources, and technical assistance to SchedMD’s extensive customer base. This includes cloud providers, AI companies, manufacturers, research labs, and organizations in healthcare, life sciences, energy, finance, manufacturing, and government sectors. Through this acquisition, NVIDIA and SchedMD are reinforcing the open-source foundation that drives innovation in HPC and AI, fostering collaboration and progress across industries and at every scale.
