PEAK:AIO and LANL to debut pNFS Lattice at SNIA SDC 2026
PEAK:AIO and Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) will make the first public technical presentation of pNFS Lattice at the Storage Networking Industry Association (SNIA) Developer Conference in Santa Clara on 28 September. The event marks a milestone for the open-source project, which was released under the Linux Foundation earlier in 2026 following a long-term engineering collaboration between the two organisations.
The Manchester-based software-defined storage vendor will participate in two separate sessions. A "Birds of a Feather" community discussion, led by Gary Grider of LANL alongside the wider pNFS Lattice development team, will invite storage architects and developers to explore the project's direction and opportunities for contribution. A second, more technical session will be presented by John Harechmak, Worldwide Vice President of Field Engineering at PEAK:AIO, and Brian Atkinson of LANL.
The technology
At the centre of the pNFS Lattice project is a re-architecture of how parallel file systems handle metadata. In conventional parallel storage deployments, metadata services, responsible for locating, organising and co-ordinating data objects, are typically bound to static servers or tightly coupled failover pairs. As AI training clusters scale to thousands of GPUs generating metadata-intensive workloads, those fixed architectures can become a system-wide bottleneck.
pNFS Lattice addresses this by decoupling metadata from the underlying storage infrastructure, making it an elastic, independently scalable service. The modular design is intended to let operators expand metadata capacity without rebalancing or reconfiguring storage servers, a meaningful operational benefit at hyperscale. The project extends the parallel NFS (pNFS) standard, which is part of the NFSv4 protocol family maintained by the IETF.
Market context
High-performance storage for AI and HPC is a contested and rapidly growing segment. Established vendors including DDN, WekaIO and IBM Spectrum Scale compete alongside a newer generation of software-defined platforms. The pressure on storage architecture is intensifying as GPU cluster sizes increase: frontier AI models require sustained throughput across thousands of accelerators simultaneously, and metadata bottlenecks that were tolerable at smaller scale become critical failure points at exabyte levels.
Releasing pNFS Lattice under the Linux Foundation positions the project within a broader open-source ecosystem, potentially attracting contributions from national laboratories, universities and commercial users who are reluctant to depend on proprietary metadata solutions. PEAK:AIO's existing deployments at institutions including the NHS AIDE programme, Oxford Robotics Institute and Carnegie Mellon University suggest a customer base that spans research, healthcare and academia, sectors where open standards carry particular weight.
Standards and regulatory read-across
The SNIA Developer Conference focuses explicitly on standards-based innovation, making it a relevant forum for a project built on an IETF protocol extension. As the EU AI Act and US executive orders on AI infrastructure begin to specify data-handling and provenance requirements, open and auditable storage architectures are likely to attract greater institutional interest. A Linux Foundation release gives pNFS Lattice a clear governance structure and open licensing, both of which simplify procurement in regulated research environments.
PEAK:AIO has not disclosed adoption numbers for pNFS Lattice or outlined a commercial support model for the open-source project. Observers will look to the SNIA sessions for clarity on the roadmap, community governance and any planned certifications against existing parallel file system benchmarks such as IO-500.