By Chris Mellor
Publication Date: 2025-11-24 16:53:00
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.
But DAOS is widespread, with 15 to 20+ production systems in active use. For its use to spread, it has to demonstrate, we understand, significantly better storage IO performance than competing software, meaning supporting more processing cores and delivering higher bandwidth. DAOS is open-source code and no single parallel processing storage system supplier is reliant on it. HPE has its ClusterStor as well as DAOS. DDN has its Lustre software, and VAST and WEKA each have their own software.
