Proxima: Near-Storage Acceleration for Graph-Based Approximate Nearest Neighbor Search in 3D NAND

Approximate nearest neighbor search (ANNS) plays an indispensable role in a wide variety of applications, including recommendation systems, information retrieval, and semantic search. Among the cutting-edge ANNS algorithms, graph-based approaches provide superior accuracy and scalability on massive datasets. However, the best-performing graph-based ANNS solutions incur tens of hundreds of memory footprints as well as costly distance computation, thus hindering their efficient deployment at scale. The 3D NAND flash is emerging as a promising device for data-intensive applications due to its high density and nonvolatility. In this work, we present the near-storage processing (NSP)-based ANNS solution Proxima to accelerate graph-based ANNS with algorithm-hardware co-design in 3D NAND flash. Proxima significantly reduces the complexity of graph search by leveraging the distance approximation and early termination. On top of the algorithmic enhancement, we implement the Proxima search algorithm in 3D NAND flash using the heterogeneous integration technique. To maximize 3D NAND’s bandwidth utilization, we present a customized dataflow and optimized data allocation scheme. Our evaluation results show that, compared to graph ANNS on CPU and GPU, Proxima achieves a magnitude improvement in throughput or energy efficiency. Proxima yields 7× to 13× speedup over existing ASIC designs. Furthermore, Proxima achieves a good balance between accuracy, efficiency, and storage density compared to previous NSP-based accelerators.