Curator: Efficient Indexing for Multi-Tenant Vector Databases

Curator is an in-memory vector index tailored for multi-tenant queries that simultaneously achieves low memory overhead and high query performance. Curator indexes each tenant’s vectors with a tenant-specific clustering tree and encodes these trees compactly as sub-trees of a shared clustering tree. Each tenant’s clustering tree dynamically adapts to its unique vector distribution, while maintaining a low per-tenant memory footprint.

Please refer to our paper for more details: Curator: Efficient Indexing for Multi-Tenant Vector Databases.

Repository Structure

3rd_party/faiss: C++ impl of Curator and baselines
- MultiTenantIndexIVFHierarchical.cpp: Curator
- MultiTenantIndexIVFFlat.cpp: IVF with metadata filtering
- MultiTenantIndexIVFFlatSep.cpp: IVF with per-tenant indexing
- MultiTenantIndexHNSW.cpp: HNSW with metadata filtering
indexes: Python API for indexes
- ivf_hier_faiss.py: Curator
- ivf_flat_mt_faiss.py: IVF with metadata filtering
- ivf_flat_sepidx_faiss.py: IVF with per-tenant indexing
- hnsw_mt_hnswlib.py: HNSW with metadata filtering
- hnsw_sepidx_hnswlib.py: HNSW with per-tenant indexing
dataset: code for evaluation datasets
- arxiv_dataset.py: arXiv dataset
- yfcc100m_dataset.py: YFCC100M dataset
- randperm_dataset.py: synthetic dataset with randomized access metadata (used in ablation study)
benchmark: code for running benchmarks
scripts: scripts for running experiments
- run_ablation.sh: run ablation study experiments
- run_mt_search.sh: run multi-threaded search experiments
- run_overall_exp.sh: evaluate overall performance of indexes (query, insert, delete, index size)
- run_param_sweep.sh: run parameter sweep experiments
plotting: results of experiments and scripts for plotting

How to Use

Install Dependencies

We assume that you have installed Anaconda. To install the required Python packages, run the following command:

conda env create -f environment.yml -n ann_bench
conda activate ann_bench

Build from Source

cd 3rd_party/faiss

cmake -B build . \
  -DFAISS_ENABLE_GPU=OFF \
  -DFAISS_ENABLE_PYTHON=ON \
  -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release \
  -DFAISS_OPT_LEVEL=avx2 \
  -DBUILD_TESTING=ON

make -C build -j32 faiss_avx2
make -C build -j32 swigfaiss_avx2
cd build/faiss/python
python setup.py install

Generate Datasets

mkdir -p data/yfcc100m
yfcc100m_base_url="https://dl.fbaipublicfiles.com/billion-scale-ann-benchmarks/yfcc100M"
wget -P data/yfcc100m ${yfcc100m_base_url}/base.10M.u8bin
wget -P data/yfcc100m ${yfcc100m_base_url}/base.metadata.10M.spmat

mkdir -p data/arxiv
# manually download arxiv dataset from https://www.kaggle.com/datasets/Cornell-University/arxiv
# and put it at data/arxiv/arxiv-metadata-oai-snapshot.json

python -m dataset.yfcc100m_dataset
python -m dataset.arxiv_dataset

Build Docker Image

# Download the cuda-keyring package for updating the CUDA linux GPG repository key
# https://developer.nvidia.com/blog/updating-the-cuda-linux-gpg-repository-key/
# Please replace $distro and $arch with your own distro and arch
wget https://developer.download.nvidia.com/compute/cuda/repos/$distro/$arch/cuda-keyring_1.0-1_all.deb
sudo docker build --rm -t ann-bench .

Run Benchmarks

Please refer to scripts in scripts folder for details. For example, to evaluate Curator on YFCC100M dataset, run the following command:

python=$(which python)  # assuming conda env is activated

sudo ${python} \
run_parallel_exp.py run_curator_overall_exp \
  --dataset yfcc100m \
  --cpu-limit 0 \
  --mem_limit 20000000000 \
  --num_runs 1

hatsu3/curator