Pinterest has engineered a way to serve its photo-sharing community more of the images they love.
The social-image service, with more than 400 million monthly active users, has trained bigger recommender models for improved accuracy at predicting people's interests.
Pinterest handles hundreds of millions of user requests an hour on any given day. And it must also narrow down relevant images from roughly 300 billion images on the site to roughly 50 for each person.
The last step - ranking the most relevant and engaging content for everyone using Pinterest - required a leap in acceleration to run heftier models, with minimal latency, for better predictions.
Pinterest has improved the accuracy of its recommender models powering people's home feeds and other areas, increasing engagement by as much as 16%.
The leap was enabled by switching from CPUs to NVIDIA GPUs, which could easily be applied next to other areas, including advertising images, according to Pinterest.
Normally we would be happy with a 2% increase, and 16% is just a beginning for home feeds. We see additional gains - it opens a lot of doors for opportunities, said Pong Eksombatchai, a software engineer at Pinterest.
Transformer models capable of better predictions are shaking up industries from retail to entertainment and advertising. But their leaps in performance gains of the past few years have come with a need to serve models that are some 100x bigger as their number of model parameters and computations skyrockets.
Huge Inference Gains, Same Infrastructure Cost Like many, Pinterest engineers wanted to tap into state-of-the-art recommender models to increase engagement. But serving these massive models on CPUs presented a 100x increase in cost and latency. That wasn't going to maintain its magical user experience - fresh and more appealing images - occurring within a fraction of a second.
If that latency happened, then obviously our users wouldn't like that very much because they would have to wait forever, said Eksombatchai. We are pretty close to the limit of what we can do on CPU basically.
The challenge was to serve these hundredfold larger recommender models within the same cost and latency constraints.
Working with NVIDIA, Pinterest engineers began architectural changes to optimize their inference pipeline and recommender models to enable the transition from CPU to GPU cloud instances. The technology transition began late last year and required major changes to how the company manages workloads. The result is a 100x gain in inference efficiency on the same IT budget, meeting their goals.
We are starting to use really, really big models now. And that is where the GPU comes in - to help make these models possible, Eksombatchai said.
Tapping Into cuCollections Switching from CPUs to GPUs required rethinking its inference systems architecture. Among other issues, engineers had to change how they send workloads to their inference servers. Fortunately, there are tools to assist in making the transition easier.
The Pinterest inference server built for CPUs had to be altered because it was set up to send smaller batch sizes to its servers. GPUs can handle much larger workloads, so it's necessary to set up larger batch requests to increase efficiency.
One area where this comes into play is with its embedding table lookup module. Embedding tables are used to track interactions between various context-specific features and interests of user profiles. They can track where you navigate, and what people Pin on Pinterest, share or numerous other actions, helping refine predictions on what users might like to click on next.
They are used to incrementally learn user preference based on context in order to make better content recommendations to those using Pinterest. Its embedding table lookup module required two computation steps repeated hundreds of times because of the number of features tracked.
Pinterest engineers greatly reduced this number of operations using a GPU-accelerated concurrent hash table from NVIDIA cuCollections. And they set up a custom consolidated embedding lookup module so they could merge requests into a single lookup. Better results were seen immediately.
Using cuCollections helped us to remove bottlenecks, said Eksombatchai.
Enlisting CUDA Graphs Pinterest relied on CUDA Graphs to eliminate what was remaining of the small batch operations, further optimizing its inference models.
CUDA Graphs helps reduce the CPU interactions when launching on GPUs. They're designed to enable workloads to be defined as graphs rather than single operations. They provide a mechanism to launch multiple GPU operations through a single CPU operation, reducing CPU overheads.
Pinterest enlisted CUDA Graphs to represent the model inference process as a static graph of operation instead of as those individually scheduled. This enabled the computation to be handled as a single unit without any kernel launching overhead.
The company now supports CUDA Graph as a new backend of its model server. When a model is first loaded, the model server runs the model inference once to build the graph instance. This graph can then be run repeatedly in inference to show content on its app or site.
Implementing CUDA Graphs helped Pinterest to significantly reduce inference latency of its recommender models, according to its engineers.
GPUs have enabled Pinterest to do something that was impossible with CPUs on the same budget, and by doing this they can make changes that have a direct impact on various business metrics.
Learn about Pinterest's GPU-driven inference and optimizations at its GTC session, Serving 100x Bigger Recommender Models, and in the Pinterest Engineering blog.
Register for GTC, running Sept. 19-22, for free to attend sessions with NVIDIA and dozens of industry leaders.
Most recent headlines
05/01/2027
Worlds first 802.15.4ab-UWB chip verified by Calterah and Rohde & Schwarz to be ...
09/10/2026
September 10 2026, 06:00 (PDT) Dolby Expands Dolby OptiView Platform with New Capabilities at IBC 2026
New Sports Intelligence helps providers better unders...
08/10/2026
Modern venues have come a long way since the tinny, echoing audio of the mid 20t...
08/10/2026
ESPN's first Super Bowl production will stream in English and Spanish on Disney+, while the ESPN App carries the full slate of game, ManningCast, studio, an...
08/10/2026
From high-school videoboards to War Eagle Productions, the Opelika native is learning how to lead shows and capture big moments
The future of live sports produ...
08/10/2026
The Television Academy and Prime Video have announced a six-year agreement making Prime Video the exclusive global home of the Emmy Awards beginning with the 20...
08/10/2026
Techex will exhibit at NAB Show New York 2026 (Booth 623, Javits Center, October...
08/10/2026
X Games has announced the appointment of Steve Rogers as Chief Operating Officer. Rogers previously served as COO of World Supercross and spent nearly a decade ...
08/10/2026
Fonn Group has appointed Trevor Spielmann as Sales Director for Germany, Austria, and Switzerland. Spielmann joins from EVS, where he held sales and business de...
08/10/2026
The flagship program will originate from major PG events with a four-camera production, live distribution across PGTV, social platforms
Perfect Game is bringin...
08/10/2026
Innovation rarely happens in a vacuum. More often, it happens at the point of collision: when worlds that have run on separate tracks begin to converge. That is...
08/10/2026
For decades, the production and broadcast services business has run on a familia...
08/10/2026
Uplynk, Zixi, BroadView Software, and Grass Valley have published The IP Converg...
08/10/2026
The NFL has announced the return of the Big Data Bowl, the league's analytics competition, now in its ninth year and again powered by AWS. Registration is o...
08/10/2026
Eutelsat has renewed its partnership with T l diffusion d'Alg rie (TDA), Algeria's national broadcasting network operator, for continued distribution of...
08/10/2026
Disney will livestream Super Bowl LXI on February 14, 2027, alongside the game's broadcast on ESPN and ABC. All Disney subscribers in the United States wi...
08/10/2026
RHStv and Red House Streaming have announced an expansion of their partnership w...
08/10/2026
Gray Media has announced a distribution agreement with TEGNA and DAZN to simulca...
08/10/2026
SVG readers can save 10% on registration and receive a complimentary Solutions H...
08/10/2026
PROTON Camera Innovations GmbH has been named a recipient of a 2026 Technology a...
08/10/2026
Industry leaders discuss real-world cloud workflows for live game production, pl...
08/10/2026
The next-gen audio technology joins Dolby Vision as part of Apple TV's immersive F1 experience...
08/10/2026
David France, Jesse Short Bull, Mato Wayuhi, N. Bird Runningwater, Jodi Archambau, Jhane Myers, Paul McGuire, Amber Morning Star Byars, Holly Macarro, Nick Tils...
08/10/2026
Dynamic panning plug-ins get an upgrade
Sound Particles have just announced major updates for two of their popular dynamic panning plug-ins. Energy Panner 2...
08/10/2026
New expandable instrument boasts full DMNO engine
UDO Audio have just announced the upcoming release of a new, expandable synth that packs the power of the ...
08/10/2026
Two new subwoofers added to monitoring line-up
ADAM Audio's monitoring range has just been expanded with two new DSP-equipped subwoofers, the Sub8 PRO a...
08/10/2026
eds3_5_jq(document).ready(function($) { $(#eds_sliderM519).chameleonSlider_2_1({ content_source:......
08/10/2026
Calrec gives broadcasters freedom of choice at NAB Show New York We're looking forward to meeting up with you all at NAB New York on 21st-22nd October.
Cal...
08/10/2026
Share
Copy link
Facebook
X
Linkedin
Bluesky
Email...
08/10/2026
Share
Copy link
Facebook
X
Linkedin
Bluesky
Email...
08/10/2026
Share
Copy link
Facebook
X
Linkedin
Bluesky
Email...
08/10/2026
Share
Copy link
Facebook
X
Linkedin
Bluesky
Email...
08/10/2026
Share
Copy link
Facebook
X
Linkedin
Bluesky
Email...
08/10/2026
Share
Copy link
Facebook
X
Linkedin
Bluesky
Email...
08/10/2026
Globecast, a leading provider of broadcast, media and entertainment managed services, will showcase its next generation of media orchestration services at NAB S...
08/10/2026
Clear-Com played a critical role in the production communications infrastructure for Rock in Rio 2026, one of the world's largest and most recognized music...
08/10/2026
Sohonet Launches ClearView Rush: A Leap Forward in Studio Review, Built for Crea...
08/10/2026
Share
Copy link
Facebook
X
Linkedin
Bluesky
Email...
08/10/2026
Share
Copy link
Facebook
X
Linkedin
Bluesky
Email...
08/10/2026
Share
Copy link
Facebook
X
Linkedin
Bluesky
Email...
08/10/2026
Share
Copy link
Facebook
X
Linkedin
Bluesky
Email...
08/10/2026
Ikegami announces a major expansion to its range of broadcast-quality live production cameras. Scheduled for introduction on Ikegami booth 708 at NAB New York, ...
08/10/2026
Calrec will be located at Booth 444.
Freedom to choose
The media landscape is evolving quickly, and the broadcasters best placed for what comes next will be...
08/10/2026
LiveU has announced that CRD Audiovisuel relied on LiveUs LU900Q intelligent production unit, with built-in native LiveU IQ (LIQ ) connectivity, to deliver live...
08/10/2026
Share
Copy link
Facebook
X
Linkedin
Bluesky
Email...
08/10/2026
Share
Copy link
Facebook
X
Linkedin
Bluesky
Email...
08/10/2026
Share
Copy link
Facebook
X
Linkedin
Bluesky
Email...
08/10/2026
Marshall Electronics, a globally recognized provider of high-performance video solutions for broadcast, streaming, AV and professional production, will exhibit ...
08/10/2026
14-hour package also includes A Remarkable Place to Die season 2 as well as libr...
Pinterest has engineered a way to serve its photo-sharing community more of the images they love.
