Day, me say day, me say day, Linux Foundation say DAOS
Harry Belafonte might have said ‘me say day, me day day-o’ back in the day, but The Linux Foundation say DAOS.
The newly launched DAOS Foundation is an initiative aimed at advancing the governance and development of the Distributed Asynchronous Object Storage (DAOS) project.
Distributed Asynchronous Object Storage (DAOS) is an open source storage system technology that aims to redefine performance for a wide spectrum of High-Performance Computing (HPC) and Artificial Intelligence AI workloads.
NOTE: Rather than day-o, DAOS is obviously pronounced day-os (rhymes with boss).
DAOS is designed to support high bandwidth, low latency deployments and high I/O operations per second (IOPS).
Featuring support from founding members Argonne National Laboratory (ANL), Enakta Labs, Google Cloud, Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) and Intel, DAOS works through the creation of a fully distributed key-value storage architecture that mitigates the data and metadata bottlenecks commonly associated with traditional POSIX-based HPC storage systems.
As TechTarget reminds us, “POSIX (Portable Operating System Interface) is a set of standard operating system interfaces based on the Unix operating system.”
By using commodity hardware, DAOS is said to optimize both performance and cost, supporting file, block and object semantics and a diverse range of application interfaces, including TensorFlow, HDF5 and MPI-IO.
Starting in 2012, Intel Corporation has been a key contributor to DAOS source code, which has since grown into an established open source community spanning various hardware and software on-prem and cloud vendors.
Linux Foundation – broader governance
To provide broader governance to the project and to foster future development and growth, the DAOS Foundation has launched as a project under the umbrella of the Linux Foundation.
The foundation says that this will ensure the continuous development of DAOS as an open source project and will enable other participants to engage in architectural and development decisions.
“The DAOS storage system stack provides the core high-performance storage system for Argonne Leadership Computing Facilities latest supercomputer, Aurora,” said Kevin Harms, ALCF-4 technical director at Argonne National Laboratory. “DAOS has performance 20x greater than our current file systems and will provide better performance across a broad range of I/O workload allowing application science codes to achieve high performance with less effort.”
Intel Corporation will donate the DAOS source code to the DAOS Foundation and will remain one of the main contributors to the future development of the project.
“Google Cloud is delighted to be a founding member of the DAOS Foundation,” said Sameet Agarwal, storage VP/GM, Google Cloud. “This world record-setting technology underpins our new storage service, Parallelstore.”
Advanced features such as data protection with self-healing, end-to-end data integrity and fine-grained access control have made DAOS an industry leader.
“HPE is honored to be a founding member of the DAOS Foundation and have this opportunity to contribute to a community that values open standards,” said Andrew Wheeler, of Hewlett Packard Labs. “HPE has been closely engaged with Intel on Argonne National Laboratory’s exascale deployment of DAOS and continues to contribute to the community. We support the DAOS architecture, which we believe will advance emerging supercomputing and technical computing use cases.”
The DAOS Foundation is open to anyone willing to contribute to the project.
Membership options
The Linux Foundation offers premier, general and associate membership levels, each providing a different level of participation in governing board and technical working groups.
“Intel is taking a pivotal step forward, solidifying our dedication to open source technology,” said Intel’s Hillarie Prestopine. “The DAOS Foundation will drive innovation in storage software, delivering what is essential for AI and high-performance computing.”
To learn more about the DAOS Foundation, including how to become a member and join the community visit https://foundation.daos.io/.
