Nvidia acquires open-source provider SchedMD

US chip giant Nvidia has acquired SchedMD, the leading developer of Slurm software, an open-source workload management system for high-performance computing (HPC) and artificial intelligence (AI). Nvidia hopes this will strengthen its open-source software ecosystem and drive AI innovations for researchers, developers, and businesses. The company announced on Monday. At the same time, Nvidia announced that it will continue to develop and distribute Slurm as open-source, vendor-neutral software. The company did not disclose the financial terms of the acquisition.

Nvidia states that it has been collaborating with SchedMD for over a decade and will "continue to invest in the development of Slurm to ensure it remains the leading open-source scheduler for HPC and AI." HPC and AI workloads involve complex computations where parallel tasks are executed on clusters, requiring queuing, scheduling, and allocation of computing resources. As HPC and AI clusters become larger and more powerful, efficient resource utilization is crucial, Nvidia writes.

Slurm software in numerous supercomputers

SchedMD offers such software, which helps in planning large computing tasks. These can consume a large portion of a data center's server capacity. According to Nvidia, Slurm software from SchedMD is currently used in more than half of the Top-10 and Top-100 systems on the Top-500 list of supercomputers, "as the leading workload manager in terms of scalability, throughput, and complex policy management." This makes Slurm part of the critical infrastructure required for generative AI, used by foundation model and AI developers to manage the demands of model training and inference. Developers and businesses can access Slurm for free, while SchedMD earns money from engineering and maintenance support.

SchedMD was founded in 2010 in Livermore, California, USA. The company currently employs 40 people. Customers include cloud infrastructure company CoreWeave and the Barcelona Supercomputing Center, among others.

"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,s," said Danny Auble, CEO of SchedMD, in the Nvidia announcement. He added: "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."

(akn)