Vespa Product Updates, May 2021

Vespa, an open-source big data processing and serving engine largely developed by Yahoo engineers, has announced several updates to its platform as of May 2021. These updates include support for bfloat16 and int8 tensor cell types, allowing for larger model serving without increased memory usage, and case-sensitive attribute searches, which can now be enabled using the cased match mode. Additionally, Vespa has introduced a hash-based dictionary for attributes with many unique terms, enhancing lookup speeds by avoiding full table scans, and a Hamming distance metric for Approximate Nearest Neighbor (ANN) searches using `tensor<int8>` cell types, useful for computing edit distances between sentences. Vespa is utilized by various Yahoo products and continues to evolve with community contributions and feedback.