GPU-Powered Vector Indexing in LanceDB

With LanceDB’s GPU-powered indexing you can create vector indexes for billions of rows in just a few hours. This can significantly accelerate your vector search operations.

In our tests, LanceDB’s GPU-powered indexing can process billions of vectors in under four hours, providing significant performance improvements over CPU-based indexing.

Automatic GPU Indexing in LanceDB Enterprise

💡 LanceDB Enterprise Only

Automatic GPU Indexing is currently only available in LanceDB Enterprise. Please contact us to enable this feature for your deployment.

GPU indexing is automatic in LanceDB Enterprise and it is used to build either the IVF or HNSW indexes.

Whenever you create_index, the backend will use GPU resources to build either the IVF or HNSW indexes. The system automatically selects the optimal GPU configuration based on your data size and available hardware.

This process is also asynchronous by default, but you can use wait_for_index to convert it into a synchronous process by waiting until the index is built.

Manual GPU Indexing in LanceDB OSS

You can use the Python SDK to manually create the IVF_PQ index. You will need PyTorch>2.0 . Please keep in mind that GPU based indexing is currently only supported by the synchronous SDK.

You can specify the GPU device to train IVF partitions via accelerator. Specify parameters cuda or mps (on Apple Silicon) to enable GPU training.

GPU Indexing on Linux

python

# Create index using CUDA on Nvidia GPUs.
tbl.create_index(
    num_partitions=256,
    num_sub_vectors=96,
    accelerator="cuda"
)

GPU Indexing on MacOS (Apple Silicon)

python

# Create index using MPS on Apple Silicon.
tbl.create_index(
    num_partitions=256,
    num_sub_vectors=96,
    accelerator="mps"
)

Performance Considerations

GPU memory usage scales with num_partitions and vector dimensions
For optimal performance, ensure GPU memory exceeds dataset size
Batch size is automatically tuned based on available GPU memory
Indexing speed improves with larger batch sizes

Troubleshooting

If you encounter the error AssertionError: Torch not compiled with CUDA enabled, you need to install PyTorch with CUDA support .