Nvidia has acquired SchedMD, the primary developer of Slurm, which is described as an open-source workload management system for high-performance computing and Artificial Intelligence. The company says the move is intended to strengthen the open-source software ecosystem and drive Artificial Intelligence innovation for researchers, developers and enterprises. Nvidia plans to continue developing and distributing Slurm as open-source, vendor-neutral software so that it remains broadly accessible and supported across the wider high-performance computing and Artificial Intelligence community.
The announcement emphasizes that high-performance computing and Artificial Intelligence workloads rely on complex computations that run parallel tasks on clusters, which require queuing, scheduling and careful allocation of computational resources. As these clusters increase in size and capability, the statement notes that efficient resource utilization is becoming critical. Slurm is positioned in the release as the leading workload manager and job scheduler for scalability, throughput and complex policy management across such demanding environments.
According to the announcement, Slurm is used in more than half of the top 10 and top 100 systems in the TOP500 list of supercomputers, underscoring its existing footprint in large-scale computing. Slurm is described as being supported on the latest Nvidia hardware and as a key part of the infrastructure required for generative Artificial Intelligence. The software is used by foundation model developers and Artificial Intelligence builders to manage model training and inference needs, and Nvidia frames the acquisition as a way to further integrate and support these workloads while keeping Slurm open-source and vendor-neutral.
