Nvidia Corp. announced Monday a significant expansion of its open-source artificial intelligence footprint through the acquisition of SchedMD, the primary developer of the Slurm workload management system, and the simultaneous release of its new Nemotron 3 family of open AI models.
The acquisition of SchedMD, the financial terms of which were not disclosed, is intended to bolster Nvidia's infrastructure for high-performance computing and AI. Nvidia stated that Slurm, originally launched in 2002 and developed by SchedMD since 2010, will continue to operate as an open-source, vendor-neutral software. Nvidia has collaborated with SchedMD for over a decade, citing the technology as "critical infrastructure for generative AI," according to a company blog post. Nvidia plans to continue investing in and accelerating access to the technology across various systems.
Concurrently, Nvidia introduced the Nemotron 3 family of open AI models, which the company claims is its most efficient suite for developing accurate AI agents. This new family includes Nemotron 3 Nano, designed for specific, targeted tasks; Nemotron 3 Super, built for multi-AI agent applications; and Nemotron 3 Ultra, developed for more complex computational demands.
"Open innovation is the foundation of AI progress," said Jensen Huang, Nvidia's founder and CEO, in a press release. "With Nemotron, we're transforming advanced AI into an open platform that gives developers the transparency and efficiency they need to build agentic systems at scale."
These actions follow Nvidia's ongoing efforts to strengthen its open-source and open AI offerings. Last week, the company unveiled Alpamayo-R1, an open reasoning vision language model specifically for autonomous driving research. Nvidia also enhanced its Cosmos world models with additional workflows and guides to aid developers in utilizing these open-source models for physical AI development. This strategic focus aligns with Nvidia's broader objective to position its GPUs as a primary supplier for AI and software solutions in the expanding fields of robotics and autonomous vehicles.
