Graphics chip giant NVIDIA has acquired SchedMD, the company behind Slurm, a widely-used open-source job scheduler that powers more than half of the world’s top supercomputers.
The acquisition marks a significant move by NVIDIA to consolidate its position in the artificial intelligence and high-performance computing markets, giving the company control over critical software infrastructure used by researchers, developers, and enterprises worldwide.
Slurm’s Critical Role
Slurm, or Simple Linux Utility for Resource Management, has become essential infrastructure in supercomputing environments. The software currently manages workloads on more than half of the TOP500 supercomputers globally, orchestrating complex parallel computations across thousands of CPUs and GPUs.
The scheduler is also widely deployed in AI development, where it manages the training and deployment of large language models and other computationally intensive tasks.
Commitment to Open Source
NVIDIA has pledged to maintain Slurm as an open-source, hardware-agnostic tool, ensuring continued broad accessibility for the research and development community. The company emphasized that the software will remain compatible across different hardware platforms, not exclusively tied to NVIDIA systems.
“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,” said Danny Auble, CEO of SchedMD. He added that NVIDIA’s expertise in accelerated computing would enhance Slurm’s development to meet next-generation demands.
Strategic Integration
The acquisition follows more than a decade of collaboration between the two companies. By bringing SchedMD under its umbrella, NVIDIA gains stewardship of software that bridges its hardware—including Blackwell GPUs and InfiniBand networking—with sophisticated job scheduling capabilities.
NVIDIA stated that the integration will enable customers to manage workloads more efficiently across diverse infrastructure, coordinating tasks across different hardware types while benefiting from continued Slurm innovations.
The company plans to expand support through open-source software services and training for SchedMD’s customer base, which spans cloud providers, AI developers, manufacturing firms, and research institutions.
Broader AI Strategy
The acquisition comes as NVIDIA intensifies its focus on open-source AI tools. Earlier this week, the company unveiled its Nemotron 3 Nano models, designed to be faster and more cost-effective for tasks including writing and software development.
Kari Briski, Vice President of Generative AI at NVIDIA, emphasized the company’s commitment to providing trustworthy models with available training data and security testing tools. “This is why we’re committed to it from a software engineering perspective,” Briski said.
The announcements pushed NVIDIA shares up 1.35% this week, reflecting investor confidence in the company’s strategic positioning as competition in the AI sector intensifies, particularly with the surge of AI model releases from Chinese companies.
Financial terms of the SchedMD acquisition were not disclosed.
