README.md

Experimental research code for our paper Unleashing Graph Partitioning for Large-Scale Nearest Neighbor Search.

To get started, fetch submodules.

git submodule update --init --recursive

• The exp_scripts folder contains scripts to download the datasets (beware they are large and downloading MS Turing takes forever) and build the source code -- in a way that is expected by the experiment scripts, e.g., experiments.py.

• To run the experiments, point the data_path variable to the folder containing the datasets, and create a folder exp_outputs in the top-level.

• Also remove the following code from lines 330-333 in external/hnswlib/hnswlib/hnswalg.h

  if (collect_metrics) {
      metric_hops++;
      metric_distance_computations+=size;
  }

• Build the code via python3 build.py

• Then run python3 experiments.py, which will place results in csv format in the exp_outputs folder. A query and routing simulation with s = 40-60 shards on 1B points takes roughly 12 hours. The largest fraction of this time is spent on building HNSW indices in the shards and building routing indices.

Disclaimer: This is hacky research code intended as a testbed -- not of industrial-grade quality. As such, there may be bugs and there are no warnings if something is misconfigured. If some results with this code look unexpected please contact me.