GPU Acceleration

May 18, 2026 · View on GitHub

10-100x speedup for vector operations with GPU acceleration.

Overview

NornicDB leverages GPU acceleration for:

Vector similarity search
K-means clustering
Embedding generation
Matrix operations

Supported Backends

Backend	Platform	Performance
Metal	macOS (Apple Silicon)	Excellent
CUDA	NVIDIA GPUs	Excellent
Vulkan	Cross-platform	Good
CPU	Fallback	Baseline

Automatic Detection

GPU acceleration is automatically detected and enabled:

🟢 GPU Acceleration: Available (backend: metal)

If no GPU is available:

🟡 GPU Acceleration: Unavailable (using CPU fallback)

Configuration

Backend selection environment variable

You can explicitly request which GPU backend NornicDB should use by setting the NORNICDB_GPU_BACKEND environment variable. When unset the server will auto-detect an available backend.

Accepted values:

auto (default) — automatically detect the best available backend
vulkan — use the Vulkan backend
cuda — use the CUDA backend (NVIDIA GPUs)
metal — use Apple's Metal backend (macOS/Apple Silicon)
cpu — force CPU-only fallback

If a requested backend is unavailable at runtime, NornicDB will fall back to a compatible backend or to CPU processing.

Examples

PowerShell (temporary for current process):

$env:NORNICDB_GPU_BACKEND = 'vulkan'
.\bin\nornicdb.exe serve

Unix shell:

export NORNICDB_GPU_BACKEND=vulkan
./bin/nornicdb serve

Docker run example:

docker run -e NORNICDB_GPU_BACKEND=vulkan \
  -p 7474:7474 -p 7687:7687 \
  --device /dev/dri:/dev/dri \
  timothyswt/nornicdb-amd64-vulkan:latest

docker-compose snippet:

services:
  nornicdb:
    image: timothyswt/nornicdb-amd64-vulkan:latest
    environment:
      - NORNICDB_GPU_BACKEND=vulkan
    devices:
      - /dev/dri:/dev/dri

Continue to the Docker section for platform-specific build/deploy examples.

Docker with GPU

Apple Silicon (Metal):

services:
  nornicdb:
    image: timothyswt/nornicdb-arm64-metal:latest
    # Metal is automatically enabled

NVIDIA (CUDA):

services:
  nornicdb:
    image: timothyswt/nornicdb-amd64-cuda:latest
    deploy:
      resources:
        reservations:
          devices:
            - driver: nvidia
              count: 1
              capabilities: [gpu]

Performance Benchmarks

Vector Search (1M vectors, 1024 dimensions)

Backend	Latency	Throughput
Metal (M2)	2ms	500 qps
CUDA (A100)	1ms	1000 qps
CPU (AVX2)	50ms	20 qps

K-Means Clustering (100K points)

Backend	Time	Speedup
Metal	120ms	50x
CUDA	80ms	75x
CPU	6000ms	1x

GPU Memory Management

Memory Limits

// GPU manager respects memory limits
gpuManager := gpu.NewManager(&gpu.Config{
    Backend:      gpu.BackendMetal,
    MaxMemoryMB:  2048,  // Limit to 2GB
    BatchSize:    1000,  // Process in batches
})

Automatic Batching

For large datasets, operations are automatically batched:

// Search 10M vectors in batches
results, err := searchService.VectorSearch(ctx, query, 10000000, 10)
// Automatically batched to fit GPU memory

Supported Operations

Vector Search

// GPU-accelerated cosine similarity search
results, err := db.HybridSearch(ctx, 
    "query text",
    queryEmbedding,  // GPU computes similarity
    nil,
    100,
)

K-Means Clustering

// GPU-accelerated clustering
clusterer := kmeans.NewGPUClusterer(&kmeans.Config{
    K:          10,
    MaxIters:   100,
    Tolerance:  0.0001,
    UseGPU:     true,
})

centroids, assignments, err := clusterer.Cluster(vectors)

Embedding Generation

// GPU-accelerated local embeddings
embedder := embed.NewLocalEmbedder(&embed.Config{
    ModelPath:  "/models/mxbai-embed-large.gguf",
    GPULayers:  -1,  // Auto-detect
})

Troubleshooting

GPU Not Detected

# Check GPU status
curl http://localhost:7474/status | jq .gpu

Out of Memory

# Reduce batch size
export NORNICDB_GPU_BATCH_SIZE=500

# Limit GPU memory
export NORNICDB_GPU_MAX_MEMORY_MB=1024

CUDA Errors

# Check NVIDIA driver
nvidia-smi

# Check CUDA version
nvcc --version

# Ensure container has GPU access
docker run --gpus all nvidia/cuda:11.8-base nvidia-smi

Metal Errors (macOS)

# Check Metal support
system_profiler SPDisplaysDataType | grep Metal

# Ensure running on Apple Silicon
uname -m  # Should show arm64

Fallback Behavior

If GPU acceleration fails, NornicDB automatically falls back to CPU:

// Automatic fallback
result, err := gpuManager.VectorSearch(vectors, query, k)
if err == gpu.ErrGPUUnavailable {
    // Falls back to CPU automatically
    result = cpuSearch(vectors, query, k)
}