Does this have corresponding speed ups or memory gains for normal CPUs too? Just thinking about all the cups of coffee that have been made and drunk while scikit-learn kmeans chugs through a notebook :)
For CPU with bigger K you would put the centroids in a search tree, so take advantage of the sparsity, while a GPU would calculate the full NxK distance matrix. So from my understanding the bottleneck they are fixing doesn't show up on CPU.
search trees tend not to scale well to higher dimensions though, right?
from what I've seen I had the impression that Yinyang k-means was the best way to take advantage of the sparsity.
Most data I've used is for geospatial with D<=4 (xyzt) so for me search trees worked great. But for things like descriptor or embedding clustering yes, trees wouldn't be useful.
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