  Object storage solutions potentially address long-standing performance issues
with POSIX file systems for certain I/O workloads, and new storage technologies
offer promising performance characteristics for data-intensive use cases. In
this work, we present a preliminary assessment of Intel's Distributed
Asynchronous Object Store (DAOS), an emerging high-performance object store, in
conjunction with non-volatile storage and evaluate its potential use for HPC
storage. We demonstrate DAOS can provide the required performance, with
bandwidth scaling linearly with additional DAOS server nodes in most cases,
although choices in configuration and application design can impact achievable
bandwidth. We describe a new I/O benchmark and associated metrics that address
object storage performance from application-derived workloads.
