Vector Search (oneVS)

[aw042]

I saw cuVS integrated into Weaviate, and I thought, “How can this be cross-platform? Does oneAPI already have something like cuVS?” I could not find details about this anywhere, so I think I (we?) have to make it. The algorithms for vector search are already out there, we don’t have to reinvent the wheel—we just need to write them in SYCL/DPC++.

I’m not sure where to open an issue or contribute code. I’m new to this, so to get my feet wet I’ll try writing it locally, and hopefully we can sync up and collaborate in a repo if this gains traction.

[napetrov]

Hi @aw042 ,
it's not part of UXL but there is https://github.com/intel/ScalableVectorSearch which currently CPU focused and is best mapped to cuVS functionality.

Also oneDAL(https://github.com/uxlfoundation/oneDAL) does have some of similarity search algorithms, though they are more scikit-learn oriented and exact instead of approximate nearest neighbors.

Also there was work done on porting FAISS to SYCL supported GPUs - it's not finalized, but yet there is potential for alignment/reuse.

Would be happy to meet and talk through those options in more details.

I think that SVS is better place from functionality perspective, and GPU support exist there in longerterm plans. Though there was no plans on moving SVS to UXL, however depending on feedback requests this could be considered.
oneDAL also possible if UXL centricity is a requirement for now as it's already part of UXL and would contain base infrastructure for building ML algos. .

And on implementation - i think it should also relay on MKL/oneMath as there is quite GEMM intensive computations.

[aw042]

Thanks for the quick response, @napetrov. I'll see if I can add SYCL support to SVS using oneMath for math ops. Adding it as a backend for FAISS (similar to faiss-gpu-cuvs) is interesting, though the FAISS-SYCL port might be more viable depending on its state.