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Visual contents, including images and videos, are dominant on the Internet today. The conventional search engine is mainly designed for textual documents, which must be extended to process and manage increasingly high volumes of visual data objects. In this paper, we present Mixer, an effective system to identify and analyze visual contents and to extract their features for data retrievals, aiming at addressing two critical issues: (1) efficiently and timely understanding visual contents, (2) retrieving them at high precision and recall rates without impairing the performance. In Mixer, the visual objects are categorized into different classes, each of which has representative visual features. Subsystems for model production and model execution are developed. Two retrieval layers are designed and implemented for images and videos, respectively. In this way, we are able to perform aggregation retrievals of the two types in efficient ways. The experiments with Baidu's production workloads and systems show that Mixer halves the model production time and raises the feature production throughput by 9.14x. Mixer also achieves the precision and recall of video retrievals at 95% and 97%, respectively. Mixer has been in its daily operations, which makes the search engine highly scalable for visual contents at a low cost. Having observed productivity improvement of upper-level applications in the search engine, we believe our system framework would generally benefit other data processing applications. 

Performing inference on pre-trained neural network models must meet the requirement of low-latency, which is often at odds with achieving high throughput. Existing deep learning systems use batching to improve throughput, which do not perform well when serving Recurrent Neural Networks with dynamic dataflow graphs. We propose the technique of cellular batching, which improves both the latency and throughput of RNN inference. Unlike existing systems that batch a fixed set of dataflow graphs, cellular batching makes batching decisions at the granularity of an RNN "cell" (a subgraph with shared weights) and dynamically assembles a batched cell for execution as requests join and leave the system. We implemented our approach in a system called BatchMaker. Experiments show that BatchMaker achieves much lower latency and also higher throughput than existing systems.