Integrating flash-kmeans into the ColBERT repo (initial setup)

I’m dusting off my ColBERT maintenance hat and getting back into the rhythm of things. The first thing I’m working on for the next release is exploring the most likely integration of flash-kmeans ( arxiv , github , pypi ) as a replacement for faiss-gpu. flash-kmeans (2026 Yang, et al) is a ridiculously fast “IO-aware batched K-Means clustering implemented with Triton GPU kernels.” I’ll be digging…