NVIDIA acquires SchedMD to bolster open‑source AI workload management
Slurm maintainer joins NVIDIA as company reiterates open‑source, vendor‑neutral commitment
NVIDIA has acquired SchedMD, the primary developer behind the open‑source Slurm workload manager for high‑performance computing and artificial intelligence.
The deal is aimed at strengthening the company’s open‑source software ecosystem and simplifying how researchers, enterprises and startups orchestrate large‑scale AI jobs, according to the company.
Slurm sits at the heart of many supercomputing and AI clusters, handling queuing, scheduling and resource allocation across thousands of CPUs and GPUs.
NVIDIA said it will continue to develop and distribute Slurm as open‑source, vendor‑neutral software, and that support will extend across diverse hardware and software environments.
Danny Auble, CEO of SchedMD, said in a blog post that the tie‑up validates Slurm’s critical role in demanding HPC and AI environments and affirmed that Slurm will remain open source.
NVIDIA noted it has collaborated with SchedMD for over a decade and will invest further so that Slurm continues to be the leading open‑source scheduler for HPC and AI.
How will the acquisition affect Slurm and its community
According to NVIDIA, SchedMD’s engineers will keep leading Slurm’s development and commercial support, and existing customers will continue to receive training and services.
The company indicated it will speed up SchedMD’s access to new systems so users of NVIDIA’s accelerated computing platform can optimise workloads across entire clusters, while maintaining support for heterogeneous environments so organisations can run mixed hardware with the latest Slurm innovations.
What changes for customers
- Open‑source continuity Slurm will continue to be developed and distributed as a vendor‑neutral project with community access.
- Broader support footprint: NVIDIA said SchedMD’s support, training and development services will carry on for hundreds of customers across cloud providers, manufacturers, AI companies and research labs.
- Faster time to features The company said closer integration will help Slurm users tap new capabilities sooner for scheduling, accounting and GPU‑aware job management across large clusters.
What is SchedMD and Slurm?
Slurm, short for Simple Linux Utility for Resource Management, is widely adopted across universities, national labs and hyperscale AI builders for its scalability, throughput and flexible policy controls.
SchedMD was founded in 2010 by Morris “Moe” Jette and Danny Auble to steward Slurm, which originally emerged from work at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.
The company, headquartered in Utah, provides commercial support and custom development around Slurm while the software itself remains free and open source.