Title
Combining CPU and GPU architectures for fast similarity search
Abstract
The Signature Quadratic Form Distance on feature signatures represents a flexible distance-based similarity model for effective content-based multimedia retrieval. Although metric indexing approaches are able to speed up query processing by two orders of magnitude, their applicability to large-scale multimedia databases containing billions of images is still a challenging issue. In this paper, we propose a parallel approach that balances the utilization of CPU and many-core GPUs for efficient similarity search with the Signature Quadratic Form Distance. In particular, we show how to process multiple distance computations and other parts of the search procedure in parallel, achieving maximal performance of the combined CPU/GPU system. The experimental evaluation demonstrates that our approach implemented on a common workstation with 2 GPU cards outperforms traditional parallel implementation on a high-end 48-core NUMA server in terms of efficiency almost by an order of magnitude. If we consider also the price of the high-end server that is ten times higher than that of the GPU workstation then, based on price/performance ratio, the GPU-based similarity search beats the CPU-based solution by almost two orders of magnitude. Although proposed for the SQFD, our approach of fast GPU-based similarity search is applicable for any distance function that is efficiently parallelizable in the SIMT execution model.
Year
DOI
Venue
2012
10.1007/s10619-012-7092-4
Distributed and Parallel Databases
Keywords
Field
DocType
Similarity search,Database indexing,Parallel computing,GPU,Pivot table,Metric,Ptolemaic,Multimedia databases
Central processing unit,Computer science,Parallel computing,Metric (mathematics),Workstation,Search engine indexing,Execution model,Database index,Nearest neighbor search,Speedup
Journal
Volume
Issue
ISSN
30
3-4
0926-8782
Citations 
PageRank 
References 
24
0.81
27
Authors
4
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Martin Krulis17613.27
Tomáš Skopal239329.84
Jakub Lokoč313510.82
Christian Beecks443139.14