Nvidia Corp (NASDAQ:NVDA, XETRA:NVD) announced that it has acquired SchedMD, the company behind Slurm, a widely used open-source workload manager for high-performance computing (HPC) and AI, in a move aimed at strengthening its AI and HPC software ecosystem.
The financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.
Nvidia said it will continue to develop and distribute Slurm as open-source, vendor-neutral software, ensuring it remains accessible to the broader HPC and AI community across diverse hardware and software environments.
Slurm is currently used in more than half of the top 10 and top 100 supercomputers listed in the TOP500, and plays a critical role in managing complex AI and HPC workloads.
HPC and AI workloads often involve running large-scale, parallel computations that require efficient scheduling and allocation of resources. Nvidia said the acquisition will allow SchedMD to reach more users and optimize workloads across heterogeneous computing infrastructures, while continuing to support a range of industries, including cloud computing, AI development, healthcare, energy, financial services, manufacturing, and government research.
“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,” SchedMD CEO Danny Auble said in a statement.
“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.”
Analysts at Wedbush see the deal as a positive for the company. “With scheduling and resource management a key driver of utilization for large clusters (and with Nvidia having worked with SchedMD for over a decade), we see this tuck-in acquisition as likely being additive and a good fit immediately, albeit with any impact likely being at the margin," they wrote.
Shares of Nvidia traded modestly higher following the announcement, up 0.2% at $176 on Tuesday morning. The stock is up 31.7% in the year to date.