Congratulations to NVIDIA and SchedMD: A new chapter for Slurm and the HPC community

Yesterday's announcement that NVIDIA has acquired SchedMD marks a significant milestone for the HPC and AI communities. On behalf of everyone at CIQ, I want to extend our congratulations to both NVIDIA and the SchedMD team on this partnership. Slurm has been the backbone of High Performance Computing for decades, and seeing it receive this level of investment and validation speaks to its enduring importance in our industry.

Very well done, Danny Auble, Moe Jetty, and the SchedMD team who have built something remarkable. Slurm schedules more than half of the top supercomputers in the world, and its role in managing the complex workloads that drive scientific discovery, from climate modeling to drug discovery to materials science, cannot be overstated. NVIDIA's commitment to keeping Slurm open source and vendor-neutral is exactly what the community needs to hear, and it reflects a recognition that the future of computing depends on open collaboration, not closed ecosystems.

We're at an inflection point where traditional HPC and modern AI workloads are converging. Clusters that once ran molecular dynamics simulations are now training large language models. Researchers who optimized parallel solvers are now architecting transformer architectures. This convergence demands infrastructure that can handle both paradigms, and Slurm has been adapting to meet that challenge.

NVIDIA's investment signals something important: workload management and scheduling aren't just plumbing. They're critical infrastructure for tomorrow’s core infrastructure. As AI clusters scale to tens of thousands of GPUs and HPC systems push toward exascale and beyond, the software that orchestrates these resources becomes just as important as the silicon itself.

At CIQ, we've always believed in meeting organizations where they are. That's why we provide turn-key HPC cluster solutions based on Warewulf Pro and we recently announced that Fuzzball now integrates with both Slurm and PBS as backend provisioners. Organizations running traditional HPC clusters shouldn't have to choose between preserving their operational investments and gaining modern container orchestration, AI workflow capabilities, and hybrid cloud flexibility. Fuzzball's integration with Slurm allows users to continue submitting jobs exactly as they always have while gradually adopting container-native workflows when it makes sense for their teams.

This integration approach respects the decades of expertise that HPC centers have built around Slurm. It provides a practical path for organizations that want to modernize their infrastructure for AI workloads without disrupting mission-critical research. And with NVIDIA's new commitment to Slurm's development, we're excited to continue supporting this integration as Slurm evolves to meet the demands of next-generation computing.

NVIDIA's commitment to keeping Slurm open source is the right move, and I'm optimistic about what this acquisition means for Slurm's continued development. At the same time, having multiple high-quality options in the ecosystem, multiple vendors investing in workload management innovation, and multiple paths for organizations to modernize their infrastructure keeps everyone honest and keeps innovation moving forward.

Whether you're running Slurm, PBS, or Fuzzball, the goal is the same: to give researchers the tools they need to push the boundaries of science and to give IT teams the infrastructure that empowers rather than constrains.

The convergence of HPC and AI is accelerating, and the next few years will bring challenges we haven't even imagined yet. Organizations will need infrastructure that's flexible enough to adapt, performant enough to handle massive scale, and open enough to avoid lock-in. They'll need workload managers that understand both traditional parallel computing and modern AI patterns. And they'll need partners who understand that their infrastructure investments aren't about replacing everything they've built, they're about building on that foundation for what comes next.

Congratulations again to NVIDIA and SchedMD. We're looking forward to what this next chapter brings for Slurm, for the community, and for the future of High Performance Computing.

And for organizations thinking about how to navigate this evolving landscape, we're here to help. Whether that's through Fuzzball's Slurm integration, our native scheduler, or the broader capabilities of our performance-intensive computing platform, CIQ is committed to giving you the choice, flexibility, and control you need to drive your research forward.

Gregory Kurtzer is CEO and Founder of CIQ, co-founder of Rocky Linux, co-founder of CentOS, and creator of Warewulf and Singularity (now Apptainer). He is a longtime contributor to the open-source HPC community. To learn more about Fuzzball's approach to workload management, visit ciq.com/products/fuzzball.