DAOS – A Year In Review

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2025 Highlights

The Distributed Asynchronous Object Storage (DAOS) software continues to evolve, with 2025 focusing on increasing stability and robustness, having two point releases to v2.6 while continuing to provide unparalleled performance. Once again, DAOS continues to lead the IO-500 Production list in the #1 and #2 slots, and holds the top three slots in the 10-Node Production list.

DAOS Releases (see release notes for details)

  • DAOS v2.6.4 Release – October 29, 2025
    • This release includes better resource management (e.g. limit number of active bulks), fixes several races related to DTX, allows dfuse to use global handles for better scalability and multiple fixes in the rebuild system to prevent hangs on unstable networks.
  • DAOS v2.6.3 Release – March 27, 2025
    • This release added credits and flow control for server-side RPC forwarding and avoiding RPC congestion, added 3-fault-tolerant EC object classes and fixed a bug in collective punch for sparse ranks causing engine coredump.

Foundation Transition

The DAOS Foundation completed its transition of assets from Intel to the DAOS Foundation. Intel continues to invest as a member of the Board. The upcoming DAOS v2.8 release will be the first community release of DAOS.

Updated DAOS Roadmap (updated October 2025)

  • The DAOS roadmap was updated to detail the upcoming v2.8 release. This release will be the first community release of DAOS.
    • The md-on-ssd phase 1 feature has been augmented with an improved memory allocator and md-on-ssd phase 2 has transitioned to Tech Preview.
    • Support for a native pyTorch loader has been added.
  • The v3.0 release brings official support for metadata-on-SSD phase 2.
    • It adds incremental rebuild support and lays the foundation for future rolling upgrade support.
    • 3.0 expects a communications protocol change which will not allow backward compatibility with older versions.

Community Activity

DAOS User News

  • Oak Ridge National Laboratory
    • ORNL has announced that their planned Discovery supercomputer will feature DAOS-based storage known as HPE Cray Supercomputing Storage Systems K3000.
  • Leibniz Supercomputing Centre
    • Provides DAOS as part of the SuperMUC-NG system.
    • The storage system debuted at #2 on the IO-500 production list.
  • HPE

2025 Events

DAOS community members participate in various events as well as host the DAOS User Group (DUG) events, all of which expand awareness and education about the benefits and applications for DAOS. (The events with hyperlinks below include access to slides from these events):

Looking Forward to 2026

The DAOS Governing Board would like to thank the membership for their participation in 2025 and planning for another great year in 2026. The Board invites members from government, academia and industry to join the Foundation as part of their exploration of DAOS. We will continue to prioritize hosting community events and engaging the wider HPC, AI and Storage communities through various events during the year. We look forward to hearing from the community and addressing feedback while helping to address the community’s evolving storage needs.

  • Upcoming DAOS Releases
    • DAOS v2.8 (1Q’26)
    • DAOS v3.0 (2H’26)
  • Upcoming Community Events
    • Save the Date! Virtual DUG’26 will take place May 21, 2026
    • DUG’26 at SC’26 will take place in November, exact date TBA
    • DAOS will be at CUG – hope to see you there!
    • Stay tuned for more events throughout the year! 
  • How to Participate
    • DAOS TSC Meetings – Calendar
    • DAOS Newsletter – sign up to receive technical updates, community news and event information
    • DAOS Slack – join to discuss technical topics and questions 
    • Follow us on social media!