Abstract:Given a vector dataset $\mathcal{X}$ and a query vector $\vec{x}_q$, graph-based Approximate Nearest Neighbor Search (ANNS) aims to build a graph index $G$ and approximately return vectors with minimum distances to $\vec{x}_q$ by searching over $G$. The main drawback of graph-based ANNS is that a graph index would be too large to fit into the memory especially for a large-scale $\mathcal{X}$. To solve this, a Product Quantization (PQ)-based hybrid method called DiskANN is proposed to store a low-dimensional PQ index in memory and retain a graph index in SSD, thus reducing memory overhead while ensuring a high search accuracy. However, it suffers from two I/O issues that significantly affect the overall efficiency: (1) long routing path from an entry vertex to the query's neighborhood that results in large number of I/O requests and (2) redundant I/O requests during the routing process. We propose an optimized DiskANN++ to overcome above issues. Specifically, for the first issue, we present a query-sensitive entry vertex selection strategy to replace DiskANN's static graph-central entry vertex by a dynamically determined entry vertex that is close to the query. For the second I/O issue, we present an isomorphic mapping on DiskANN's graph index to optimize the SSD layout and propose an asynchronously optimized Pagesearch based on the optimized SSD layout as an alternative to DiskANN's beamsearch. Comprehensive experimental studies on eight real-world datasets demonstrate our DiskANN++'s superiority on efficiency. We achieve a notable 1.5 X to 2.2 X improvement on QPS compared to DiskANN, given the same accuracy constraint.