How high-end supercomputer filesystem DAOS can break out of its niche

DAOS has been a great success in the traditional HPC/supercomputing world, but is nowhere in the new, AI-focused, GPU supercomputing arena. What will it take for DAOS to find customers outside its high-end, legacy supercomputing niche?

The DAOS parallel filesystem has a strong IO500 presence, holding positions 1 (Argonne) and 2 (LRZ) in the current Production SC25 list. The two, according to HPE, combined have four times the storage benchmark score of the next 30 storage systems. DAOS also appears at number 13 (Zuse Institute, Berlin), and 17 (China Telecom Research Institute). The software appears more often in the full IO500 list, with 16 of the top 30 submissions using DAOS, and 26 of the top 45 being DAOS devotees.

DAOS has stronger still representation in the IO500 10-Node production list: systems with just 10 clients. It holds the top 3 positions plus number 6.