New AI Trick Could Make Searches 8x Faster

Researchers have developed RT-HiSS, the first exact GPU algorithm using ray tracing hardware to accelerate high-dimensional similarity searches. While these special-purpose cores were built for graphics, the method repurposes them to quickly build indexes and search large datasets, then refines candidates on standard GPU cores. A clever two-pass batching strategy manages memory limits and balances workloads efficiently, with additional optimizations for shared memory and compressed result masks. Across six real-world datasets, RT-HiSS achieves speedups of up to 8.37 times over leading GPU algorithms and up to 2,368.26 times over brute-force search.