NVIDIA Acquires Open-Source Workload Management Provider SchedMD

NVIDIA will continue to distribute SchedMD’s open-source, vendor-neutral Slurm software, ensuring wide availability for high-performance computing and AI.

NVIDIA today announced it has acquired SchedMD — the leading developer of Slurm, an open-source workload management system for high-performance computing (HPC) and AI — to help strengthen the open-source software ecosystem and drive AI innovation for researchers, developers and enterprises.

NVIDIA will continue to develop and distribute Slurm as open-source, vendor-neutral software, making it widely available to and supported by the broader HPC and AI community across diverse hardware and software environments.

HPC and AI workloads involve complex computations running parallel tasks on clusters that require queuing, scheduling and allocating computational resources. As HPC and AI clusters get larger and more powerful, efficient resource utilization is critical.

As the leading workload manager and job scheduler in scalability, throughput and complex policy management, Slurm is used in more than half of the top 10 and top 100 systems in the TOP500 list of supercomputers.

Slurm, which is supported on the latest NVIDIA hardware, is also part of the critical infrastructure needed for generative AI, used by foundation model developers and AI builders to manage model training and inference needs.

“We’re thrilled to join forces with NVIDIA, as this acquisition is the ultimate validation of Slurm’s critical role in the world’s most demanding HPC and AI environments,” said Danny Auble, CEO of SchedMD. “NVIDIA’s deep expertise and investment in accelerated computing will enhance the development of Slurm — which will continue to be open source — to meet the demands of the next generation of AI and supercomputing.”

NVIDIA has been collaborating with SchedMD for over a decade and will continue investing in Slurm’s development to ensure it remains the leading open-source scheduler for HPC and AI.

NVIDIA will accelerate SchedMD’s access to new systems — allowing users of NVIDIA’s accelerated computing platform to optimize workloads across their entire compute infrastructure — while also supporting a diverse hardware and software ecosystem, so customers can run heterogeneous clusters with the latest Slurm innovations.

NVIDIA will continue to offer open-source software support, training and development for Slurm to SchedMD’s hundreds of customers, which include cloud providers, manufacturers, AI companies and research labs spanning industries such as autonomous driving, healthcare and life sciences, energy, financial services, manufacturing and government.

Together with SchedMD, NVIDIA is bolstering the open-source software ecosystem to catalyze HPC and AI innovation across industries, at every scale.

Credit: Nvidia