Manchester, UK, June 03, 2026 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) — PEAK:AIO, a leader in high-performance storage for artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing (HPC), today announced Lattice, the industry’s first open-source pNFS metadata server. Developed through a long-term engineering collaboration between PEAK:AIO and Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL), Lattice introduces a new distributed metadata architecture designed to eliminate one of the most persistent constraints in large-scale AI and high-performance computing infrastructure.
The announcement comes as AI infrastructure demands reshape the storage market. AI workloads, including training large models, running inference at scale and serving agentic AI applications, require ultrafast, parallel access to massive datasets continuously and reliably. GPU compute has scaled dramatically, but the storage layer feeding it, and particularly the metadata architecture coordinating it, has not kept pace. Average GPU utilization across 23,000 production clusters is 5% (Cast AI), not because the hardware is inadequate, but because the software feeding it cannot keep up. The metadata bottleneck in parallel storage systems has become a critical constraint on AI workload performance.
Lattice resolves this architectural limitation. Built as a Linux-based, user-space pNFS metadata server designed for scale, modularity and distributed coordination. Open source, community supported and launched under the Linux Foundation, Lattice separates the metadata control plane into four distinct layers: Protocol State Plane, Lattice Core, MD Catalog Authority and Data Server Control Plane. This architecture makes metadata services truly elastic for the first time, allowing them to spin up dynamically on commodity hardware whenever and wherever needed, from a single server to more than 1,000 metadata servers.
The announcement will be formally presented at the International Conference on Massive Storage Systems and Technology – MSST 2026 in Santa Clara, California. Lattice is being launched in collaboration with the Linux Foundation as an open-source project intended to accelerate community innovation around scalable AI and HPC storage infrastructure.
“PNFS-Lattice is unique in that it is an open source, user space, scalable PNFS metadata server, from the ground up, by leveraging the concept of separating the PNFS metadata service from the Metadata Store (catalog),” said Gary Grider, HPC Division Leader at Los Alamos National Laboratory. “Since the service is separate from the persistent metadata and it runs in user space, it is well poised to be an ephemeral service that could be resized on the fly. Further, since it is open source and user space, it lowers the bar for community participation, encouraging more innovation driven by AI, HPC, and other community needs.”
Performance testing conducted during the collaboration demonstrated gains from 70 GB/s to 400 GB/s. On existing production hardware at LANL, standard Linux NFS configurations delivered between 3 GB/s and 7 GB/s throughput, while the pNFS Lattice architecture achieved 40 GB/s on identical servers. Additional testing conducted with a Tier 1 technical university demonstrated metadata-heavy workload improvements exceeding 300% compared with conventional approaches.
Performance work is continuing to push new boundaries, but even at this early stage, Lattice is showing the scale of the breakthrough. In standard metadata benchmarks such as MDtest, early testing has demonstrated up to a 10x improvement over standard Linux KNFSD, while Lattice’s advanced features have delivered more than 300% improvement in traditionally difficult metadata-heavy workloads. When combined with its elastic, ephemeral metadata scaling model, where metadata services can be added dynamically as demand grows, Lattice moves beyond the limits of conventional high-performance data designs and creates a new foundation for metadata performance, resilience and scale in open pNFS and parallel file system design
“AI infrastructure markets are approaching an inflection point where scaling compute alone no longer delivers any meaningful efficiency gains,” said Roger Cummings, President and CEO of PEAK:AIO. “Our collaboration with Los Alamos National Laboratory was built around the idea that if AI infrastructure is to scale efficiently, metadata must become elastic, distributed and open. Lattice represents that transition, and we’re excited to build it with the Linux and HPC communities beside us.”
Additionally, PEAK:AIO will also offer PEAK:AIO pNFS, a commercially supported superset of Lattice, for organizations that want enterprise SLAs and a full feature set without managing the open-source stack directly. This model mirrors the relationship between Lustre and its commercial distributions, while maintaining a fully open standards-based foundation.
“The key innovation behind Lattice is that it breaks apart what has traditionally been locked inside a single metadata server into four distinct layers: the Protocol State Plane, the Lattice Core, the MD Catalog Authority, and the Data Server Control Plane,” said Mark Klarzynski, CSO and Co-Founder of PEAK:AIO. “That separation unlocks intelligent scale in a way traditional storage architectures were never designed to support. Metadata and data services can now become distributed, elastic participants that scale, fail over and adapt around the workload, rather than remaining fixed appliances or static MDS pairs. This is a fundamental step forward for pNFS and parallel file system design for ultra-high-performance storage, allowing metadata to move beyond the limitations that have constrained scale-out storage for decades.”
Work Cited: Cast AI. “2026 State of Kubernetes Optimization Report.” cast.ai, Cast AI, 21 April 2026, https://cast.ai/reports/state-of-kubernetes-optimization/.
About PEAK:AIO
PEAK:AIO is a Manchester UK-based software-defined AI storage company. Its platform delivers high-performance AI storage from a single server to exabytes on any industry-standard hardware. PEAK:AIO is deployed at Los Alamos National Laboratory, NHS AIDE, Oxford Robotics Institute, Carnegie Mellon University, University of Liverpool, University of Strathclyde MediForge Hub, and Zoological Society of London. Learn more at https://peakaio.com
About Los Alamos National Laboratory
Los Alamos National Laboratory is a multi-program, federally funded research and development center for the National Nuclear Security Administration of the U.S. Department of Energy. The Laboratory’s priority roles are serving as a nuclear weapons design agency and a nuclear weapons production agency; addressing nuclear threats; and performing national security science, technology, and engineering.
Joanne Hogue Smart Connections PR for PEAK:AIO +1 (410) 658-8246 joanne@smartconnectionspr.com
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