Nvidia has announced the strategic acquisition of SchedMD, the developer behind the widely adopted open-source workload management system, Slurm.
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.
This move is a significant affirmation of the chip designer’s commitment to strengthening its grip on the artificial intelligence (AI) ecosystem, not just through hardware, but through control and enhancement of the essential software layers that enable the efficient use of its high-performance chips. The acquisition, for which financial details were not disclosed, comes as Nvidia faces intensifying competition and strategically doubles down on the importance of the open-source community.
SchedMD’s flagship product, Slurm (Simple Linux Utility for Resource Management), is a sophisticated, vendor-neutral software that serves as the de facto cluster management and job scheduling system for large-scale computing environments globally.
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Slurm’s importance in the current AI landscape is profound. The product is designed to schedule and manage enormous computing jobs, such as those required for training large foundation models and performing generative AI inference. It ensures the efficient allocation of vast shares of a data center’s server capacity and, crucially, excels at managing and optimizing the use of high-value resources like GPUs alongside CPUs across massive computing clusters.
This directly maximizes the return on investment for customers purchasing Nvidia hardware.
Slurm is a cornerstone of the global supercomputing community, currently acting as the scheduler for more than half of the top 10 and top 100 supercomputer systems on the prestigious TOP500 list, demonstrating its unmatched scalability and efficiency in distributed environments. Its customer base spans major institutions and private firms, including the cloud infrastructure firm CoreWeave and the Barcelona Supercomputing Center.
The integration of SchedMD and its Slurm technology directly supports Nvidia’s strategy, which views its proprietary CUDA software ecosystem as the critical moat protecting its market dominance. While Nvidia builds its reputation on fast chips, the software stack is what locks developers into the platform.
Nvidia gains the ability to accelerate the development of the scheduler itself by acquiring the team behind Slurm. This allows the company to ensure that Slurm is optimized at the most fundamental level to meet the rapidly evolving demands of next-generation AI and supercomputing, maximizing the throughput and efficiency of its newest hardware generations, such as the NVIDIA GB200 systems. This deep integration is vital for foundation model developers who need highly efficient resource management for distributed training jobs.
Additionally, this acquisition helps neutralize the efforts of rival chip makers, such as AMD, who are actively building competing GPU platforms and often rely on Slurm integration to appeal to customers. By owning the leading open-source scheduler, Nvidia can directly influence its future, making it strategically more challenging for competitors to offer a truly seamless and optimized experience on alternative hardware stacks, thereby maintaining its overall control of the AI infrastructure.
Despite taking ownership, Nvidia has made an explicit and crucial commitment to maintain and distribute Slurm as open-source, vendor-neutral software. This dedication reassures the existing ecosystem of supercomputing centers and AI labs that rely on Slurm for flexibility and multi-vendor compatibility.
The move strengthens Nvidia’s overall open-source push, which also includes the recent unveiling of its new Nemotron 3 family of open-source AI models, all aimed at cementing its influence across the entire AI stack, from silicon to scheduling.
The acquisition of the 40-person company, which was founded in 2010 by Slurm developers Morris “Moe” Jette and Danny Auble, reinforces Nvidia’s strategy of making targeted, high-impact investments in the software layers that control how its accelerated computing platform is utilized, ensuring its hardware remains the indispensable component in the global AI infrastructure.