Nvidia has acquired SchedMD, the developer of Slurm, an open source workload management system used in high performance computing and artificial intelligence, with the goal of strengthening the open source software ecosystem and driving artificial intelligence innovation for researchers, developers and enterprises. The company says it will continue to develop and distribute Slurm as open source, vendor neutral software, keeping it widely available and supported across a broad high performance computing and artificial intelligence community running on diverse hardware and software environments.
The article explains that high performance computing and artificial intelligence workloads rely on complex computations and parallel tasks on clusters that require queuing, scheduling and resource allocation, and as these clusters grow, efficient utilization becomes critical. Slurm is described as the leading workload manager and job scheduler for scalability, throughput and complex policy management, and is used in more than half of the top 10 and top 100 systems in the TOP500 list of supercomputers. The software is supported on the latest Nvidia hardware and is positioned as critical infrastructure for generative artificial intelligence, helping foundation model developers and artificial intelligence builders manage training and inference workloads.
SchedMD chief executive Danny Auble calls the acquisition validation of Slurm’s importance in demanding high performance computing and artificial intelligence environments, and notes that Slurm will remain open source under Nvidia’s ownership. Nvidia, which has collaborated with SchedMD for over a decade, plans to invest further in Slurm development so it remains the leading open source scheduler for high performance computing and artificial intelligence, and to accelerate SchedMD’s access to new systems so users of Nvidia’s accelerated computing platform can optimize workloads across their entire infrastructure. The company will support heterogeneous clusters across a diverse hardware and software ecosystem, and will continue to provide open source software support, training and development for Slurm to SchedMD’s hundreds of customers, which include cloud providers, manufacturers, artificial intelligence companies and research labs in sectors such as autonomous driving, healthcare and life sciences, energy, financial services, manufacturing and government. Together, Nvidia and SchedMD aim to bolster the open source software ecosystem to catalyze high performance computing and artificial intelligence innovation across industries and at every scale.
