DASP: Specific Dense Matrix Multiply-Accumulate Units Accelerated General Sparse Matrix-Vector Multiplication

Sparse matrix-vector multiplication (SpMV) plays a key role in computational science and engineering, graph processing, and machine learning applications. Much work on SpMV was devoted to resolving problems such as random access to the vector 𝑥 and unbalanced load. However, we have experimentally found that the computation of inner products still occupies much overhead in the SpMV operation, which has been largely ignored in existing work.

In this paper, we propose DASP, a new algorithm using specific dense MMA units for accelerating the compute part of general SpMV. We analyze the row-wise distribution of nonzeros and group the rows into three categories containing long, medium, and short rows, respectively. We then organize them into small blocks of proper sizes to meet the requirement of MMA computation. For the three categories, DASP offers different strategies to complete SpMV by efficiently utilizing the MMA units.

The experimental results on two newest NVIDIA GPUs A100 and H800 show that our DASP in FP64 precision outperforms five latest SpMV methods CSR5, TileSpMV, LSRB-CSR, cuSPARSE BSR format and cuSPARSE CSR format by a factor of on average 1.46x, 2.09x, 3.29x, 2.08x and 1.52x (up to 12.64x, 17.48x, 90.59x, 283.92x and 6.94x) on A100, respectively. As for SpMV in FP16 precision, our DASP outperforms cuSPARSE by a factor of on average 1.70x and 1.75x (up to 26.47x and 65.94x) on A100 and H800, respectively.