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DAOS Foundation

The Linux Foundation’s home for DAOS, the high-performance storage system Intel started for exascale supercomputers: member dues and a governing board on one side, a technical steering committee that now makes the releases on the other.

1 projects in this catalogPart of the Linux FoundationWebsite

What it is

The DAOS Foundation is part of the non-profit Linux Foundation. Argonne National Laboratory, Enakta Labs, Google Cloud, Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) and Intel launched it on November 9, 2023, and Intel, which had developed DAOS since 2012, donated the source code to it while promising to remain a main contributor. It hosts one project, DAOS (Distributed Asynchronous Object Storage), an all-flash storage system for supercomputers and AI clusters. Membership comes in Premier, General and Associate levels with different roles on the governing board and in technical working groups, and contributing code needs no membership at all.

The foundation exists because DAOS outgrew its sponsor. Intel built it for the Aurora supercomputer at Argonne, around its own Optane persistent memory; after Intel cancelled Optane in 2022, a neutral home let the users and vendors who depended on DAOS share the work. Intel made its last release, 2.6, in July 2024, and HPE now leads development. In October 2026 the foundation’s members page showed six members: Argonne, Google, HPE, Intel, MangoBoost and VDURA, which joined in 2024.

For someone choosing storage, the badge means DAOS’s name, roadmap and releases no longer depend on Intel alone, and the code is under a permissive BSD licence. It doesn’t mean a large community: a handful of companies and national labs do almost all the work, and the foundation has no maturity stages.

Its projects in this catalog

DAOSOpen sourceDistributed Asynchronous Object Storage: an all-flash storage system for supercomputers and AI clusters that runs entirely in user space and serves a parallel file system on top of its own key-value object store.

In depth

Who decides#

A governing board handles money, membership and outreach. In October 2026 it was chaired by Kevin Harms of Argonne and had seats for Google (as the representative of the General members), HPE, Intel and VDURA, plus the chairs of the technical steering committee and the outreach committee.

Technical work belongs to the Technical Steering Committee (TSC), described as a forum for DAOS developers to organise contributions and coordinate development. Each founding company appointed one voting member, and the TSC unanimously elected Johann Lombardi, DAOS’s long-time architect and now at HPE, as its chair. It meets every two weeks in public, recorded meetings open to anyone. The foundation took over release management from Intel with version 2.8, released on August 12, 2026.

Where it came from2012–2026

Intel started DAOS in 2012 as research for the US Department of Energy’s exascale programme and built it into the storage system of Aurora, the supercomputer it delivered to Argonne with HPE. The design depended on Intel’s Optane persistent memory, so when Intel cancelled Optane in 2022 much of the company’s reason to fund DAOS went with it, while Argonne, Google, which was building its Parallelstore service on DAOS, and HPE still needed it.

On November 9, 2023 the Linux Foundation announced the DAOS Foundation with Argonne, Enakta Labs, Google Cloud, HPE and Intel as founders, saying it would “enable other participants to engage in architectural and development decisions”. VDURA joined in 2024. Intel made its last release, 2.6, in July 2024, and the foundation’s TSC shipped 2.8 in August 2026 as the first community release.

Why it’s built this way

Intel hands over the code but keeps contributing
With governance at a neutral foundation, other vendors and users could invest in DAOS without it remaining Intel’s product, while Intel promised to stay a main contributor.
Open contribution, paid seats
Anyone can contribute code, but Premier, General and Associate members get different roles on the governing board and in the working groups.

Timeline

  1. 2012

    Intel starts DAOS research

  2. 2022

    Intel cancels Optane, the persistent memory DAOS was designed around

  3. 2023

    DAOS Foundation launched on November 9 by Argonne, Enakta Labs, Google Cloud, HPE and Intel

  4. 2024

    VDURA joins; Intel’s last release, 2.6, in July

  5. 2026

    DAOS 2.8 in August, the first release managed by the foundation

Sources · facts checked 2026-10-28

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