Chipmaker and AI computing company NVIDIA has acquired SchedMD, the developer of Slurm, an open-source workload management system widely used in high-performance computing and artificial intelligence environments.
SchedMD develops Slurm, a tool that helps organizations manage how computing jobs are queued, scheduled, and run across large clusters of servers. These clusters are commonly used for scientific research and AI tasks that require many computations to run at the same time. Slurm is by AI developers to manage the training and operation of large AI models.
NVIDIA said it will continue to develop and distribute Slurm as open-source, vendor-neutral software. The company said the software will remain available to the broader HPC and AI community and continue to work across different hardware and software platforms.
“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,” said Danny Auble, CEO of SchedMD.
HPC and AI workloads rely on systems that can efficiently share computing resources among many users and tasks. As these systems grow in size and complexity, proper scheduling and resource use become more important to avoid wasted capacity.
NVIDIA has worked with SchedMD for more than a decade and said it will continue investing in Slurm to support its ongoing development for HPC and AI use cases.
The company said the acquisition will give SchedMD access to new systems and allow users of NVIDIA’s accelerated computing platform to better manage workloads across their full computing infrastructure. NVIDIA added that it will continue to support mixed environments, where organizations use hardware and software from different vendors.
NVIDIA will continue to provide open-source support, training, and development services for Slurm to SchedMD’s customers. These customers include cloud providers, manufacturers, AI companies, and research institutions in sectors such as healthcare, energy, financial services, manufacturing, and government.