NetANNS: A High-Performance Distributed Search Framework Based On In-Network Computing

Approximate nearest neighbor search (ANNS) is the most basic and important algorithm in Database, Machine Learning and other applications. With the expansion of cloud computing, the academia focuses on the study of how to optimize distributed frameworks based on approximate nearest neighbor search such as MapReduce, and Memcached. We implement a new distributed ANNS search framework (NetANNS). The main contributions of NetANNS are to accelerate the data preprocessing with programmable switch, and integrate a variety of efficient ANNS algorithms so that it can choose the most suitable algorithm for each datasets. The experiments show that the search efficiency of NetANNS is about 2x than the common distributed ANNS frameworks which are implemented based on the framework of MapReduce.