What Powers Similarity Search in Milvus Vector Database

As the core vector execution engine, Knowhere to Milvus is what an engine is to a sports car. This post introduces what Knowhere is, how it is different from Faiss, and how the code of Knowhere is structured.

The Concept of Knowhere

Narrowly speaking, Knowhere is an operation interface for accessing services in the upper layers of the system and vector similarity search libraries like Faiss, Hnswlib and Annoy in the lower layers of the system. In addition, Knowhere is also in charge of heterogeneous computing. More specifically, Knowhere controls which hardware (eg. CPU or GPU) to execute index building and search requests. This is how Knowhere gets its name — knowing where to execute the operations. More types of hardware including DPU and TPU will be supported in future releases.

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