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This looks great. I'm actually giving a talk on this type of search for my Master's project this coming Friday. I was looking at providing semantic similarity s

This looks great. I'm actually giving a talk on this type of search for my Master's project this coming Friday. I was looking at providing semantic similarity search across a collection of research papers to build a "semantic research network". Currently I'm using a lot of pre-processing on the backend before putting all the results in Mongo for end-users.. but this looks like I can get closer to real time with a modest GPU cluster. My only complaint is that I wish GPU support wasn't CUDA only...

hamiltont 10y ago
sounds awesome. Can you share any links to already-published work?
- ethanwillis 10y ago
  Not at the moment! I'm still working on papers, but I'll remember to post/send you a pre-print when I have that available. I've got two things. There's the application I mentioned and then also a (soon to be) open source focused academic web crawler that powers it, based on citeseerx, microsoft academic graph, etc.
jhj 10y ago
Hi, I’m the author of the Faiss GPU code. The GPU implementation depends upon a lot of particularities in CUDA (warp shuffles and warp ballots, tricks with using register memory), and gets much of its speed in this way. Much of the code would be much slower if unable to use register file memory and instead forced to use shared memory instead (the k-selection most notably). Some needed functionality is supported in OpenCL 2.0; e.g., https://www.khronos.org/registry/OpenCL/sdk/2.0/docs/man/xhtml/cl_khr_subgroups.html https://www.khronos.org/registry/OpenCL/sdk/2.0/docs/man/xht... but are still extensions or implementation specific, and I wouldn’t hold my breath for them to work well. OpenCL tends to be lowest common denominator and for bleeding-edge GPU programming it won’t map well. I don’t think shuffles are supported at all in OpenCL (?). They are available directly in AMD’s GPU ISA, but have slightly different semantics, and at that point you're just using something that is as proprietary as CUDA. Not to mention trying to support wavefront size 64 vs. warp size 32 etc: http://gpuopen.com/amd-gcn-assembly-cross-lane-operations/ http://gpuopen.com/amd-gcn-assembly-cross-lane-operations/
- visarga 10y ago
  Great work! As a demo, could you make a Reddit comment or thread search engine based on document embeddings? It would be interesting to search through the treasure trove with word vectors. The comment dataset is already available in the wild.
- ethanwillis 10y ago
  Very interesting. GPU programming is not my area at all so I don't mean to discount your work! Thanks for the thoughtful response and all the work you put into Faiss.

hamiltont 10y ago

sounds awesome. Can you share any links to already-published work?

ethanwillis 10y ago
Not at the moment! I'm still working on papers, but I'll remember to post/send you a pre-print when I have that available. I've got two things. There's the application I mentioned and then also a (soon to be) open source focused academic web crawler that powers it, based on citeseerx, microsoft academic graph, etc.

jhj 10y ago

Hi, I’m the author of the Faiss GPU code. The GPU implementation depends upon a lot of particularities in CUDA (warp shuffles and warp ballots, tricks with using register memory), and gets much of its speed in this way. Much of the code would be much slower if unable to use register file memory and instead forced to use shared memory instead (the k-selection most notably). Some needed functionality is supported in OpenCL 2.0; e.g., https://www.khronos.org/registry/OpenCL/sdk/2.0/docs/man/xhtml/cl_khr_subgroups.html https://www.khronos.org/registry/OpenCL/sdk/2.0/docs/man/xht... but are still extensions or implementation specific, and I wouldn’t hold my breath for them to work well. OpenCL tends to be lowest common denominator and for bleeding-edge GPU programming it won’t map well. I don’t think shuffles are supported at all in OpenCL (?). They are available directly in AMD’s GPU ISA, but have slightly different semantics, and at that point you're just using something that is as proprietary as CUDA. Not to mention trying to support wavefront size 64 vs. warp size 32 etc: http://gpuopen.com/amd-gcn-assembly-cross-lane-operations/ http://gpuopen.com/amd-gcn-assembly-cross-lane-operations/

visarga 10y ago
Great work! As a demo, could you make a Reddit comment or thread search engine based on document embeddings? It would be interesting to search through the treasure trove with word vectors. The comment dataset is already available in the wild.
ethanwillis 10y ago
Very interesting. GPU programming is not my area at all so I don't mean to discount your work! Thanks for the thoughtful response and all the work you put into Faiss.