Nvidia acquires SchedMD, the company behind Slurm (the dominant HPC job scheduler), raising open-source software access concerns.

Nvidia last December announced it would acquire SchedMD, giving it control of open-source software called Slurm, which schedules computing tasks and is critical for training large language models that power chatbots such as Anthropic's Claude. Slurm also runs on government supercomputers which help forecast the weather and develop nuclear weapons. The Slurm software helps power about 60% of supercomputers worldwide, according to SchedMD, making it a foundational tool across the industry.

The acquisition has raised concerns among artificial-intelligence and supercomputer specialists who see the move as a test of the biggest AI chip company's commitment to maintaining a fair playing field for chip rivals and AI data center builders. Some of the engineers and executives who use those systems fear that Nvidia will subtly favor itself, five people say, such as by writing software updates for its own chips before those of rivals like Advanced Micro Devices. Early tests could be how quickly Nvidia integrates new chips from AMD due later this year into Slurm's computer code compared with how quickly Nvidia integrates the software with its own technologies such as InfiniBand networking chips, said one of the sources, an engineer who has worked with Slurm extensively on supercomputing systems. Three of the sources who expressed concern with Nvidia's SchedMD acquisition work in the AI industry and two have knowledge of supercomputer operations.

At the same time, there is a hope among some users that Nvidia, the world's most valuable publicly traded company, will reinvigorate development, pouring some of its staggering resources into long-awaited updates of a system built years ago for government supercomputers and now spreading from national labs into frontier AI companies. Addison Snell, CEO of chip consultancy Intersect360 Research, acknowledged that Nvidia could help SchedMD users—particularly government labs—embrace newer techniques in AI alongside more traditional supercomputer work. However, Snell said concern remained that Nvidia in the long run "could take what's a common open-source tool and make it so that it works better or exclusively for its own parts, versus competing technologies such as those from Intel or AMD or any other AI processing company."

The software from SchedMD has been adopted by major AI labs. Meta Platforms, French AI startup Mistral and Anthropic use it for some specific tasks, including elements of AI training. OpenAI uses another method based on technology developed by Alphabet's Google. Industry sources point to a previous acquisition by Nvidia as part of the basis for concern: Nvidia bought Bright Computing in 2022, and Bright Computing's software is usable with non-Nvidia hardware, but it has been optimized for Nvidia, creating a performance penalty for users of other chips without additional work, the AI industry sources said.

In response, Nvidia said in a statement: "Customers everywhere benefit from our open source and free software. Slurm is open-source and we continue to provide enhancements for everyone." When announcing the SchedMD acquisition, Nvidia also said it was committed to developing and widely distributing the "open-source, vendor-neutral software." Nvidia dismissed claims about Bright Computing, saying that the technology supports "nearly any CPU or GPU-accelerated cluster," and added that it has a track record of continuing to provide free and improved offerings after acquiring open-source software firms. The company stated it will "continue to offer open-source software support, training and development for Slurm to SchedMD's hundreds of customers."