Getting Your Indices in a Row: Full-Text Search for LLM Training Data for Real World

The performance of Large Language Models (LLMs) is determined by their training data. Despite the proliferation of open-weight LLMs, access to LLM training data has remained limited. Even for fully open LLMs, the scale of the data makes it all but inscrutable to the general scientific community, despite potentially containing critical data scraped from the internet. In this paper, we present the full-text indexing pipeline for the Apertus LLM training data. Leveraging Elasticsearch parallel indices and the Alps infrastructure, a state-of-the-art, highly energy-efficient arm64 supercluster, we were able to index 8.6T tokens out of 15.2T used to train the Apertus LLM family, creating both a critical LLM safety tool and effectively an offline, curated, open web search engine. Our contribution is threefold. First, we demonstrate that Elasticsearch can be successfully ported onto next-generation arm64-based infrastructure. Second, we demonstrate that full-text indexing at the scale of modern LLM training datasets and the entire open web is feasible and accessible. Finally, we demonstrate that such indices can be used to ensure previously inaccessible jailbreak-agnostic LLM safety. We hope that our findings will be useful to other teams attempting large-scale data indexing and facilitate the general transition towards greener computation.