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DeepSeek's smallpond: Bringing Distributed Computing to DuckDB


DeepSeek is pushing DuckDB beyond its single-node roots with smallpond, a new, simple approach to distributed compute. But does it solve the scalability challenge—or introduce new trade-offs?

Thomas Wolf, Co-founder and Chief of Product at HuggingFace shared some of his highlights, but we're going to focus on one particularly important project went that unmentioned— smallpond, a distributed compute framework built on DuckDB. While S3 is a reliable and scalable object store, it comes with higher latency and eventual consistency, making it less ideal for AI training workloads that require fast, real-time data access. For AI-heavy workloads that demand rapid iteration and distributed compute, 3FS offers a more optimized, AI-native storage layer— trading off some cost and operational complexity for raw speed and performance.

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