Searching 100 billion vectors in object storage

Hosted by Nathan VanBenschoten, Doug Turnbull, and Trey Grainger

Thu, Feb 26, 2026

7:00 PM UTC (1 hour)

Virtual (Zoom)

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AI-Powered Search: Modern Retrieval for Humans & Agents
Trey Grainger and Doug Turnbull
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What you'll learn

Architecting a modern search database from first principles

Learn how turbopuffer was built from first principles as a fast, yet stateless query tier on object storage like S3.

The critical compute vs. bandwidth tradeoffs and bottlenecks

Many engines over-rely on expensive memory or SSDs. Learn where the true bottlenecks lie and how to optimize for scale.

How hierarchical clustering overcomes bandwidth bottlenecks

See how multi-level centroid-based indexing overcomes typical bandwidth bottlenecks on slower object storage tiers.

Binary Quantization at 100 Billion Scale

Discover how RaBitQ compresses vectors 16-32x while preserving recall to power fast search over 100 billion vectors.

Why this topic matters

In this Lightning Lesson, Nathan will introduce turbopuffer, a new search database built from first principles on object storage. He will introduce the architecture of the system at a high level before diving deep on how it was recently enhanced to serve production search at 100 billion vector scale.

You'll learn from

Nathan VanBenschoten

Chief Architect at turbopuffer

Nathan VanBenschoten is the Chief Architect at turbopuffer, where he works on fast, cheap, scalable vector search. Before joining turbopuffer, Nathan was a principal engineer at CockroachDB, where he led transactions and replication.

Doug Turnbull

Principal Search Engineer

Doug Turnbull has led search teams since 2013. He worked on AI in e-commerce going as far back an 2022 at Shopify. Delivered the largest experimental wins on Reddit search, and now advises AI and search teams as they take on modern search challenges. He is co-author of the book AI-Powered Search and teaches on Maven with his Cheat at Search and AI-Powered Search courses.

Trey Grainger

Founder @ Searchkernel, Author "AI-Powered Search"

Trey is lead author of the book AI-Powered Search and is the founder of Searchkernel, a software company building the next generation of AI-powered search. He is an advisor to several startups and adjunct professor of computer science at Furman University. He previously served as CTO of Presearch, a decentralized web search engine, and as chief algorithms officer and SVP of engineering at Lucidworks, an search company whose search technology powers hundreds of the world’s leading organizations. Trey in an instructor for the AI-Powered Search course on Maven.

Turbopuffer
Cockroach Labs
Google
Reddit
Lucidworks

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