The chipmaker plans to continue investing in the development of Slurm, SchedMD’s open-source workload management system for HPC and AI.
Semiconductor giant Nvidia, having recently made waves as the first company to reach a market value of $5trn, has announced additional plans to significantly broaden its open-source capabilities by acquiring SchedMD.
Founded in 2010 by the developers of workload management and scheduling software Slurm, SchedMD is headquartered in Lehi, Utah and also has locations in Poland and Spain. Slurm is used for high-performance computing (HPC) and artificial intelligence (AI).
With the acquisition, Nvidia intends to “strengthen the open-source software ecosystem” and drive AI innovation for researchers, developers and enterprises. The organisation has stated it 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”.
Commenting on the announcement, Danny Auble, the CEO of SchedMD said: “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.
“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.”
Having collaborated with SchedMD for more than a decade, Nvidia explained it will continue investing in Slurm’s development, furthering its reputation as a “leading open-source scheduler for HPC and AI”.
Nvidia will also continue to offer open-source software support, training and development for Slurm to SchedMD’s customers, including cloud providers, manufacturers, AI companies and research labs spanning a number of industries such as autonomous driving, healthcare, life sciences, energy, financial services, manufacturing and government.
Over the course of the last year alone, Nvidia has invested heavily in advanced and high-tech sectors, announcing plans to invest £2bn into the UK’s AI start-up ecosystem with the aim of developing AI tech in the country, creating new companies and generating jobs.
The company also revealed plans to purchase $5bn worth of its struggling competitor Intel’s stock, with the news coming alongside the announcement of a partnership between the two semiconductor businesses to jointly develop multiple generations of custom data centre and personal computer products.
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