Java Panama Vector API Integrated with Apache Lucene

• lucene

  11 2,333 9.8 Java

  Apache Lucene open-source search software

  

https://github.com/apache/lucene/issues/10047

2. The Panama Vector API allows CPU's that support it to accelerate vector operations: https://openjdk.org/jeps/438

So this allows fast ANN on Lucene for semantic search!

How did people do this before Lucene supported it? Only through entirely different tools?

• ann-benchmarks

  50 4,568 8.1 Python

  Benchmarks of approximate nearest neighbor libraries in Python

This will be a big deal if Lucene got competitive on http://ann-benchmarks.com if it became a serious alternative (and more holistic) than the vector databases.

But it comes with continued challenges if I understand:

- Panama is an incubating API and Java has taken its time having an official way of using SIMD

- It only works on Java 20, with a very specific set of flags passed to the JVM. It’ll take time for this change to make it into Elasticsearch and Solr

- Panama itself is a weird and very low level API.

- Lucene organizes the HNSW vector index graph alongside its inverted index segments. And these need to be merged/compacted periodically. Merging HNSW graphs, as I understand it, is computationally difficult.

• InfluxDB

  www.influxdata.com sponsored

  Power Real-Time Data Analytics at Scale. Get real-time insights from all types of time series data with InfluxDB. Ingest, query, and analyze billions of data points in real-time with unbounded cardinality.

  

Suggest a related project