SchedMD

SchedMD
Name	SchedMD
Type	Private
Founded	2010
Headquarters	Lehi, Utah, United States
Industry	Software
Products	Slurm Workload Manager

SchedMD is a privately held company that develops, maintains, and supports the Slurm Workload Manager, a widely used job scheduler for high-performance computing. The firm provides commercial support, training, and development services to academic, government, and commercial customers operating large clusters and supercomputers. Its activities intersect with major research centers, national laboratories, and technology vendors involved in scientific computing and cloud infrastructure.

History

SchedMD was founded in 2010 by a group of engineers and researchers who had been contributing to the Slurm project at institutions such as the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Sandia National Laboratories, and Los Alamos National Laboratory. Early adopters included universities like Stanford University and Massachusetts Institute of Technology, as well as national research facilities such as Oak Ridge National Laboratory and Argonne National Laboratory. Over the 2010s the company expanded alongside growth in petascale and exascale initiatives, interacting with initiatives led by National Science Foundation, Department of Energy (United States), and international agencies like the European Commission for HPC procurement and deployment. SchedMD’s timeline reflects collaborations with hardware vendors including IBM, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, and Intel as well as software ecosystems like Red Hat and Canonical (company). The company’s evolution paralleled shifts in projects such as TOP500 rankings, the rise of accelerators from NVIDIA, and the adoption of container technologies championed by Docker, Inc. and the Open Container Initiative.

Products and Services

The company’s principal offering is professional support and development services for the Slurm Workload Manager used by research institutions such as University of California, Berkeley, Princeton University, and University of Texas at Austin. SchedMD provides enterprise features, bug fixes, and priority support to customers including national laboratories like National Center for Supercomputing Applications and corporate HPC users at firms like Boeing and ExxonMobil. Services include bespoke development contracts executed with organizations such as European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts and training engagements delivered to teams from Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and Fermilab. SchedMD also offers advisory and consulting services that interact with orchestration platforms from Kubernetes vendors and storage systems from NetApp and Dell EMC.

Technology and Development

Development work at SchedMD centers on the Slurm Workload Manager, a resource and job scheduler designed to manage queues and allocations on compute clusters. Engineering practices incorporate continuous integration tools like Jenkins and code hosting influenced by models from GitHub, while contributions and issue tracking follow workflows common at GitLab. SchedMD engineers engage with developer communities around projects such as the Message Passing Interface implementations from Open MPI and MPICH, GPU stacks from NVIDIA CUDA, and container runtimes promoted by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation. Performance tuning often references benchmarks exemplified in Linpack runs and cluster procurement discussions visible in TOP500 lists. Interoperability work includes integration with identity and security frameworks such as Kerberos and LDAP deployed at research institutions like CERN and Max Planck Society facilities. The company balances upstream open-source contributions with proprietary engineering to meet compliance and certification requests from entities like National Aeronautics and Space Administration and European Space Agency.

Licensing and Business Model

SchedMD operates commercially while shepherding Slurm under an open-source license. The company’s business model combines subscription-based support with paid development contracts, training fees, and white-glove deployment services sold to customers including Argonne National Laboratory and private sector firms such as Siemens and Shell plc. Licensing arrangements are designed to be compatible with open-source ecosystems, enabling collaborations with distributors like SUSE and Ubuntu (operating system), and engagement with standards bodies such as the Open Source Initiative and the Linux Foundation. SchedMD’s commercial offerings are intended to reduce operational risk for mission-critical deployments in contexts like aerospace projects at Lockheed Martin and climate modeling consortia coordinated by World Meteorological Organization members.

Customers and Use Cases

Customers span academia, national laboratories, and industry. Academic users include large research universities such as University of Cambridge and University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, while government and research customers include Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and Pacific Northwest National Laboratory. Commercial deployments are found in energy companies like BP and in manufacturing R&D at General Electric. Common use cases include scheduling batch workloads for computational science codes developed in collaboration with projects like LAMMPS and GROMACS, managing workflows for climate modeling groups working with NCAR, and orchestrating machine learning training runs tied to frameworks from TensorFlow and PyTorch. The technology is also used in life sciences centers performing genomic analysis with pipelines that adopt tools from Broad Institute workflows and in financial services for risk simulation at institutions such as JPMorgan Chase.

Organizational Structure and Leadership

SchedMD’s leadership consists of engineers and executives with backgrounds in national laboratory computing, academic research, and commercial software delivery. Founders and senior staff previously held roles at facilities including Los Alamos National Laboratory and companies such as Cray, Inc. and Hewlett Packard Enterprise. The organization maintains engineering teams focused on core scheduler development, quality assurance, and customer engineering, alongside business development and professional services groups that interface with procurement organizations like U.S. Department of Defense acquisition offices and international research procurement agencies. Advisory interactions and partnerships involve entities such as Snowflake (company) for data workflows and cloud providers including Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud Platform, and Microsoft Azure for hybrid deployments.

Category:Software companies