Building Billion-Scale Vector Search - part one

Advancements in self-supervised deep learning have significantly enhanced vector search capabilities, enabling the processing of billions of vectors in milliseconds, which is crucial for handling unstructured data across various modalities such as text, audio, and images. Despite the challenges associated with scaling vector search for large datasets, particularly for organizations with extensive data but lower query traffic, hybrid algorithms using solid-state disks and in-memory data structures offer a cost-efficient solution. Vespa, an open-source big data serving engine, facilitates large-scale vector search and recommendation use cases with its versatile schema model and real-time implementation of the HNSW algorithm for approximate nearest neighbor search. This approach provides a framework for organizations to efficiently manage and scale vector search operations, balancing the need for low latency and high accuracy with economic considerations. Vespa's architecture supports the independent scaling of content and compute resources, enabling on-demand and elastic auto-scaling, which is beneficial for applications requiring high throughput and rapid query responses.