Nvidia has made major strides to enrich its open source contributions. They bought SchedMD, the leading developer of the broadly used workload management system Slurm. This acquisition, which was just announced, puts Nvidia right in the sweet spot to double down on their commitment to support open innovation in artificial intelligence (AI).
SchedMD was co-founded in 2010 by Morris Jette and Danny Auble. Since then, the company has been integral in making Slurm, which first debuted in 2002, widely used. The software is perhaps best known as the foundation for distributing compute workloads in large, high-performance computing spaces. Nvidia’s buyout of Slurm comes to further expand their fast growing toolkit. This move underscores their ongoing commitment to open source technology.
Jensen Huang, the founder and CEO of Nvidia, touted the importance of this initiative. He said, “Open innovation is at the core of AI advancement. This announcement further highlights Nvidia’s path forward, which includes a desire to promote an open ecosystem for AI innovation.
In parallel with its SchedMD acquisition, Nvidia announced a new family of open AI models, including Alpamayo-R1. This cutting-edge, multimodal, reasoning vision-language model was specifically developed to further the research of autonomous driving. With the introduction of Alpamayo-R1, Nvidia is once again taking strides to redefine the potential applications of AI across industries.
Huang further expounded on Nvidia’s big picture vision. He continued, “With Nemotron, we’re turning advanced AI into an open platform that provides developers with the transparency and efficiency to build agentic systems at scale.” This move is part of Nvidia’s continuing commitment to provide developers the most accessible tools to leverage the latest breakthroughs in AI technology.
Becca is a former senior writer at TechCrunch. She writes about venture capital trends and the startup scene. There’s much more to Rebecca’s story, and you can find her at rebecca.szkutak@techcrunch.com for deeper insights. Her understanding of the space, evident in her blog post, represents the increasing intersection between independent/open source projects and corporate acquisitions in the tech world today.
Nvidia’s announced acquisition of SchedMD further elevates its technology stack. This shift further underscores a larger trend within the technology sector, with an increasing number of organizations pouring money into open source infrastructure. It’s no secret that AI is advancing at lightning speed. With these initiatives, Nvidia is on track to have a key hand in determining the future of technology across numerous industries.