Optimizing the SpMV kernel on long-vector accelerators

Abstract

Sparse Matrix-Vector multiplication (SpMV) is an essential kernel for parallel numerical applications. SpMV displays sparse and irregular data accesses, which complicate its vectorization. Such difficulties make SpMV to frequently experiment non-optimal results when run on long vector ISAs exploiting SIMD parallelism. In this context, the development of new optimizations becomes fundamental to enable high performance SpMV executions on emerging long vector architectures. In our work, we improve the state-of-the-art SELL-C- sparse matrix format by proposing several new optimizations for SpMV. We target aggressive long vector architectures like the NEC Vector Engine. By combining several optimizations, we obtain an average 12% improvement over SELL-C- considering a heterogeneous set of 24 matrices. Our optimizations boost performance in long vector architectures since they expose a high degree of SIMD parallelism.