An RDMA-First Object Storage System with SmartNIC Offload

AI training and inference impose sustained, fine-grain I/O that stresses host-mediated, TCP-based storage paths. Motivated by kernel-bypass networking and user-space storage stacks, we revisit POSIX-compatible object storage for GPU-centric pipelines. We present ROS2, an RDMA-first object storage system design that offloads the DAOS client to an NVIDIA BlueField-3 SmartNIC while leaving the DAOS I/O engine unchanged on the storage server. ROS2 separates a lightweight control plane (gRPC for namespace and capability exchange) from a high-throughput data plane (UCX/libfabric over RDMA or TCP) and removes host mediation from the data path.