Approximate Nearest Neighbor Search (ANNS) is a fundamental vector search technique that efficiently identifies similar items in high-dimensional vector spaces. Traditionally, ANNS has served as the backbone for retrieval engines and recommendation systems, however, it struggles to keep pace with modern Transformer architectures that employ higher-dimensional embeddings and larger datasets. Unlike deep learning systems that can be horizontally scaled due to their stateless nature, ANNS remains centralized, creating a severe single-machine throughput bottleneck. Empirical testing with 100-million scale datasets reveals that even state-of-the-art CPU implementations of the Hierarchical Navigable Small World (HNSW) algorithm can’t maintain adequate performance as vector dimensions increase.
Previous research on large-scale ANNS has explored two optimization paths: index structure improvements and hardware acceleration. The Inverted MultiIndex (IMI) enhanced space partitioning through multi-codebook quantization, while PQFastScan improved performance with SIMD and cache-aware optimizations. DiskANN and SPANN introduced disk-based indexing for billion-scale datasets, addressing memory hierarchy challenges through different approaches. SONG and CAGRA achieved impressive speedups through GPU parallelization but remain constrained by GPU memory capacity. BANG handled billion-scale datasets via hybrid CPU-GPU processing but lacked critical CPU baseline comparisons. These methods frequently sacrifice compatibility, accuracy or require specialized hardware.
Researchers from the Chinese University of Hong Kong, Centre for Perceptual and Interactive Intelligence, and Theory Lab of Huawei Technologies have proposed PilotANN, a hybrid CPU-GPU system designed to overcome the limitations of existing ANNS implementations. PilotANN addresses the challenge: CPU-only implementations struggle with computational demands, while GPU-only solutions are constrained by limited memory capacity. It solves this issue by utilizing both the abundant RAM of CPUs and the parallel processing capabilities of GPUs. Moreover, it employs a three-stage graph traversal process, GPU-accelerated subgraph traversal using dimensionally-reduced vectors, CPU refinement, and precise search with complete vectors.
PilotANN fundamentally reimagines the vector search process through a “staged data ready processing” paradigm. It minimizes data movement across processing stages rather than adhering to traditional “move data for computation” models. It also consists of three stages: GPU piloting with subgraph and dimensionally-reduced vectors, residual refinement using subgraph with full vectors, and final traversal employing full graph and complete vectors. The design shows cost-effectiveness with only a single commodity GPU while scaling effectively across vector dimensions and graph complexity. Data transfer overhead is minimized to just the initial query vector movement to GPU and a small candidate set returning to CPU after GPU piloting.
Experimental results show PilotANN’s performance advantages across diverse large-scale datasets. PilotANN achieves a 3.9 times throughput speedup on the 96-dimensional DEEP dataset compared to the HNSW-CPU baseline, with even more impressive gains of 5.1-5.4 times on higher-dimensional datasets. PilotANN delivers significant speedups even on the notoriously challenging T2I dataset despite no specific optimizations for this benchmark. Moreover, it shows remarkable cost-effectiveness despite utilizing more expensive hardware. While the GPU-based platform costs 2.81 USD/hour compared to the CPU-only solution at 1.69 USD/hour, PilotANN achieves 2.3 times cost-effectiveness for DEEP and 3.0-3.2 times for T2I, WIKI, and LAION datasets when measuring throughput per dollar.
In conclusion, researchers introduced PilotANN, an advancement in graph-based ANNS that effectively utilizes CPU and GPU resources for emerging workloads. It shows great performance over existing CPU-only approaches through the intelligent decomposition of top-k search into a multi-stage CPU-GPU pipeline and implementation of efficient entry selection. It democratizes high-performance nearest neighbor search by achieving competitive results with a single commodity GPU, making advanced search capabilities accessible to researchers and organizations with limited computing resources. Unlike alternative solutions requiring expensive high-end GPUs, PilotANN enables efficient ANNS deployment on common hardware configurations while maintaining search accuracy.
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