Publications

Optimization of block sparse matrix-vector multiplication on shared-memory parallel architectures

Eberhardt, Ryan; Hoemmen, Mark F.

We examine the implementation of block compressed row storage (BCSR) sparse matrix-vector multiplication (SpMV) for sparse matrices with dense block substructure, optimized for blocks with sizes from 2x2 to 32x32, on CPU, Intel many-integrated-core, and GPU architectures. Previous research on SpMV for matrices with dense block substructure has largely focused on the design of novel data structures to optimize performance for specific architectures or to store variable-sized, variably-aligned blocks, but depending on alternate storage formats breaks compatibility with existing preconditioners and solvers or imposes significant runtime costs when converting between matrix formats. This paper instead focuses on the optimization of SpMV using the standard block compressed row storage (BCSR) format. We give a set of algorithms that performs SpMV up to 4x faster than the NVIDIA cuSPARSE cusparseDbsrmv routine, up to 147x faster than the Intel Math Kernel Library (MKL) mkl-dbsrmv routine (a single-threaded BCSR SpMV kernel), and up to 3x faster than the MKL mkl-dcsrmv routine (a multi-threaded CSR SpMV kernel).