In plain words: Finding the closest matches in a huge list is sped up by keeping the chip's math units fully busy, balancing data flow against instruction speed, without building a complicated lookup index. It beats the best graphics-chip search at similar accuracy and needs no tuning.
Abstract · TPU-KNN: K Nearest Neighbor Search at Peak FLOP/s
This paper presents a novel nearest neighbor search algorithm achieving TPU (Google Tensor Processing Unit) peak performance, outperforming state-of-the-art GPU algorithms with similar level of recall. The design of the proposed algorithm is motivated by an accurate accelerator performance model that takes into account both the memory and instruction bottlenecks. Our algorithm comes with an analytical guarantee of recall in expectation and does not require maintaining sophisticated index data structure or tuning, making it suitable for applications with frequent updates. Our work is available in the open-source package of Jax and Tensorflow on TPU.
Felix Chern, Blake Hechtman, Andy Davis, Ruiqi Guo, David Majnemer, Sanjiv Kumar
arXiv:2206.14286 · cs.PF, cs.LG · submitted Jun 28, 2022 · updated Jun 30, 2022
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