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SELL_C_sigma

swMATH ID: 11232
Software Authors: Kreutzer, Moritz; Hager, Georg; Wellein, Gerhard; Fehske, Holger; Bishop, Alan R.
Description: A unified sparse matrix data format for efficient general sparse matrix-vector multiplication on modern processors with wide SIMD units. Sparse matrix-vector multiplication (spMVM) is the most time-consuming kernel in many numerical algorithms and has been studied extensively on all modern processor and accelerator architectures. However, the optimal sparse matrix data storage format is highly hardware-specific, which could become an obstacle when using heterogeneous systems. Also, it is as yet unclear how the wide single instruction multiple data (SIMD) units in current multi- and many-core processors should be used most efficiently if there is no structure in the sparsity pattern of the matrix. We suggest SELL-C-σ, a variant of Sliced ELLPACK, as a SIMD-friendly data format which combines long-standing ideas from general-purpose graphics processing units and vector computer programming. We discuss the advantages of SELL-C-σ compared to established formats like compressed row storage and ELLPACK and show its suitability on a variety of hardware platforms (Intel Sandy Bridge, Intel Xeon Phi, and Nvidia Tesla K20) for a wide range of test matrices from different application areas. Using appropriate performance models we develop deep insight into the data transfer properties of the SELL-C-σ spMVM kernel. SELL-C-σ comes with two tuning parameters whose performance impact across the range of test matrices is studied and for which reasonable choices are proposed. This leads to a hardware-independent (“catch-all”) sparse matrix format, which achieves very high efficiency for all test matrices across all hardware platforms.
Homepage: http://blogs.fau.de/essex/files/2012/11/SELL-C-sigma.pdf
Keywords: sparse matrix; sparse matrix-vector multiplication; data format; performance model; numerical examples; algorithm; single instruction multiple data
Related Software: SparseMatrix; CUDA; CUSPARSE; yaSpMV; CUSP; clSpMV; ITER-REF; FEAST; OpenCL; FEniCS; CRAFT; ELSI; ELPA; STRUMPACK; CholQR; CIRR; ITPACK; LightSpMV; CSR5; COFFEE
Cited in: 11 Documents

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