For anybody confused, the "Vortex" stuff is the underlying data format used but isn't the database/whatever this website (by the creators of Vortex) is pushing.
No surprise there's nothing to look at, since it's basically a press release posted on their blog.
I'm excited to start doing some experimentation with Vortex to see how it can improve our products.
Great stuff, congrats to Will and team!
Application error: a client-side exception has occurred while loading vortex.dev (see the browser console for more information).
Console: unable to create webgl context
You may be interested in https://github.com/vortex-data/vortex which of course has an overview and links to their docs and benchmark pages.
+ No hardware acceleration enabled.
+ Multiple graphics cards, and browser can't decide which to use.
+ Race conditions that can rarely cause a mount of 3d onto a 2d context (often happens to Unity).
I would think that a GPU isn't just sitting there waiting on a process that's in turn waiting for one query to finish to start the next query, but that a bunch of parallel queries and scans would be running, fed from many DB and object store servers, keeping the GPUs as utilized as possible. Given how expensive GPUs are, it would seem like a good trade to buy more servers to keep them fed, even if you do want to make the servers and DB/object store reads faster.
First is the storage bottleneck. Network-attached storage is usually a bottleneck for uncached data. Then there is CPU work decoding data. Spiral claims that their table format is ready to load by the GPU so they can bypass various CPU-bound decoding stages. Once you eliminate storage and CPU bottlenecks, the remaining bottleneck is usually the PCI bus that sits between the host memory and the GPU, and they can't solve that themselves. (And no amount of parallelization can help when the bus is saturated.) What they can do is use the network, the host bus, and the GPU more efficiently by compressing and packing data with greater mechanical sympathy.
They've left unanswered how they're going to commercialize it, but my guess is that they're going to use a proprietary fork of Vortex that provides extra performance or features, or perhaps they'll offer commercial services or integrations that make it easier to use. The open-source release gives its customers a Reason to Believe, in marketing parlance.
Seems that they are targeting a low-to-no overhead path from s3 bucket to GPU, by targeting: same compression/faster random access, streamed encoding from S3 while in flight, zero copy to GPU.
Not 100% clear on the details, but I doubt that they can actually saturate the cpu/gpu bus, but rather just saturate the GPU utilization, which is itself dependent on multiple possible bottlenecks but generally not on bus bandwidth.
That's not criticism: it literally means you can't do better unless you improve the GPU utilization of your AI model.
EDIT> Maybe its how some poeple call the 4th dimension time when there is infact a 4th spatial dimension. So I guess if this is the 3rd Data dimension like what is the 4th one?
Who knows, maybe a Web 3.1 will deliver us from Enshitification.
When I read "possible extension through embedded wasm encoders" I can already imagine the c++ linker hell required to get this thing included in my project.
I also don't think a lot of people need "ai scale".
If any tools would've supported that.
If you want modern parquet, then you want the Lance format (or LanceDB for DB-like CRUD semantics).
For better or worse
So it's "optimized for machines to consume" meaning the GPU.
Their use case was training ML models where you need to feed the GPU massive datasets as part of training.
They seem to claim that training is now bottlenecked by how quickly you can feed the GPU, that otherwise the GPU is basically "waiting on IO" most of the time and not actual computing because the time goes in just grabbing the next piece of data, transforming it for GPU consumption, and then feeding it into the GPU.
But I'm not an expert, this is just my take from the article.
... i'm gonna make revolutionary claims and grandiose statements like "built for the ai era".
basically im not sure where the product is hiding under all of this bluster but this doesnt feel very "hacker"-Y
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