DAOS Performance Expands Beyond Intel Optane and Into the Google Cloud

By Rob Farber

October 17, 2022

Distributed Asynchronous Object Storage (DAOS) continues to define high storage performance while transitioning into the cloud and beyond current Intel Optane storage technology devices. Google’s work on DAOS in the cloud, for example, helps users realize the benefits of HPC in the cloud. This includes the flexibility to create and tear down entire HPC clusters within minutes. With the Google HPC-toolkit, of which DAOS is a part, users can transition their on-premises HPC workloads to the Google Cloud. As HPC users know quite well, tying together numerous computational devices drives the need for high-bandwidth, low-latency, and high I/O operations per second HPC storage — else storage becomes the bottleneck. With the Google announcement, capabilities for DAOS are now possible in the Cloud HPC Toolkit for a fully automated user experience.

Andrey Kudryavtsev (DAOS product manager at Intel) recalls, “Google and Intel have been collaborating for almost two years to provide an easy path for HPC workloads to migrate to the cloud. CSPs appreciate the DAOS storage capabilities because it expands their service offerings, delivers high performance on Ethernet communications fabrics and, because it runs in user space, can be easily containerized. DAOS naturally supports the cloud instance use case of spin up the storage server, perform fast IO, then migrate the data to a less expensive storage tier — a use case that is also becoming more common in on-premises datacenters. ”

CSPs appreciate the DAOS storage capabilities because it expands their service offerings, delivers high performance on Ethernet communications fabrics (which are commonly used by ISPs) and, because it runs in user space, can be easily containerized. DAOS naturally supports the cloud instance use case of spin up the storage server, perform fast IO, then migrate the data to a less expensive storage tier — a use case that is also becoming more common in on-premises datacenters. — Andrey Kudryavtsev

Of course, Intel discontinuing Intel Optane Persistent Memory (Intel Optane Pmem) development in 2025 has left many wondering how this affects the overall DAOS story and performance capability. DAOS running on Intel Optane Pmem devices has received much press including how this combined software and memory-bus-based hardware solution set new world records in storage performance.

The Intel team’s planning for life after Intel Optane Pmem included how to meet a significant customer demand to make DAOS cloud friendly and leverage the forthcoming generations of new, multi-vendor storage technologies. The Intel team had to keep the best of the DAOS record-setting performance while eliminating two key barriers to Pmem adoption: (1) the need to purchase these specialized devices (along with a CPU that could support them) and (2) the necessary loss of a DIMM slot for each Pmem device installed on the motherboard. Both imposed unsurmountable barriers to adoption by many, including most ISPs.

The key technology advance being implemented by the Intel team allows DAOS to store its metadata in DRAM and a Write Ahead Log (WAL) on NVMe SSD (an operation analogous to a journaling filesystem) that preserve the advantages of DAOS as a distributed filesystem. “WAL”, according to Kudryavtsev, “gives DAOS the ability to build the persistent metadata store by using volatile DRAM and NVMe SSD. This way DAOS can reach a high level of parallelism by committing more operations at the same time, which wasn’t possible with the PMEM synchronous model since it holds the CPU until the data is persisted. The changes to support this new operation are localized to the management of the backend storage and has no impact on the overall DAOS protocol / existing API/software ecosystem that is already well advanced.”

WAL gives DAOS the ability to build the persistent metadata store by using volatile DRAM and NVMe SSD. This way DAOS can reach a high level of parallelism by committing more operations at the same time, which wasn’t possible with the Pmem synchronous model since it holds the CPU until the data is persisted. The changes to support this new operation are localized to the management of the backend storage and has no impact on the overall DAOS protocol / existing API/software ecosystem that is already well advanced. — Andrey Kudryavtsev

Kudryavtsev continues, “The performance advantages of DAOS extend to a distributed environment as every node has the keys to the data it owns. This makes DAOS fully distributed, with no single point metadata bottleneck and gives the node full control per dataset over how the metadata is updated.”

On-node and Distributed Cluster Performance Proves Success

The storage of choice for many HPC installations is Lustre. At ISC this year, the Intel DAOS demo included TensorFlow integration for AI applications. The results reported by Intel show that DAOS outperforms Lustre when loading a large AI dataset into TensorFlow in the Cosmoflow application. The beauty is that DAOS and Tensorflow I/O integration was achieved entirely in user space. No kernel modifications were needed, which is a boon to both ISPs and on-premises datacenters.

Another example At the University of Cambridge, DAOS has moved from a research project in the University of Cambridge Open Zettascale Lab to a production testbed on the Cumulus supercomputer run within the University of Cambridge’s Service for Data Driven Discovery (CSD3). Results presented at ISC’22 illustrated the advantages of DAOS over Lustre in a distributed HPC environment. (See DAOS Momentum Demonstrated with New IO500 Rankings and Community DAOS Traction.)

Figure 1. DAOS production installation at the University of Cambridge. Performance comparison conducted on the same storage nodes, detailed configuration available at io500.org.

Users running HPC workloads on Google will appreciate how easy it is to the spin up an instance using the Google HPC-Toolkit. All the HPC components including DAOS are made available automatically. (See the Cloud HPC Toolkit.)

Figure 2. Configuring, building, and deploying an HPC environment in Google Cloud. Credit: Google Cloud

Ivan Poddubnyy (software engineering manager, Intel)  notes this simplicity and automation reflects the success of the Google and Intel collaboration, “Automation is quite important for Google and highlights the benefits of their pipeline plus the ease of implementation for users. The Google use case demonstrates the success of incorporating DAOS into an HPC Toolkit. Simplified DAOS installation leads to easy migration of HPC workloads to the cloud, and between on-premises systems. DAOS is what makes the toolkit run better by delivering the storage performance HPC workloads require. The Google and Intel collaboration was a smart move by both companies because it closes the storage performance gap — even in the TCP-based cloud computing environments.”

DAOS Program Changes

Figure 3. DAOS to introduce two development paths: 1. Stay on Pmem with transitioning to CLX 2.0 persistent memory third party products; 2. Implement DRAM/CXL.mem 1.0 + NVMe Write Ahead Log for metadata.

For those users who are committed to Intel Optane Pmem, Intel still plans to release the next generation Intel Optane Pmem devices codenamed Crows Pass. Intel is committed to supporting customers and ecosystem partners and will continue to provide support for existing memory and storage products through end of life. The company will also support development of Compute Express Link (CXL) on future processors and platforms as they believe it will be the future and standard of tiered-memory solutions.

For more information, see:

Rob Farber is a global technology consultant and author with an extensive scientific and technical background in HPC and machine learning technology.


Notices & Disclaimers

Performance varies by use, configuration and other factors. Learn more on the Performance Index site.

Performance results are based on testing as of dates shown in configurations and may not reflect all publicly available ​updates.  See backup for configuration details.  No product or component can be absolutely secure.

Intel technologies may require enabled hardware, software or service activation.

No product or component can be absolutely secure.

Your costs and results may vary.

© Intel Corporation.  Intel, the Intel logo, and other Intel marks are trademarks of Intel Corporation or its subsidiaries.  Other names and brands may be claimed as the property of others.

 

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