A scalable sparse matrix-vector multiplication kernel for energy-efficient sparse-blas on FPGAs

Richard Dorrance, Fengbo Ren, Dejan Marković

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contribution

71 Scopus citations

Abstract

Sparse Matrix-Vector Multiplication (SpMxV) is a widely used mathematical operation in many high-performance scientific and engineering applications. In recent years, tuned software libraries for multi-core microprocessors (CPUs) and graphics processing units (GPUs) have become the status quo for computing SpMxV. However, the computational throughput of these libraries for sparse matrices tends to be significantly lower than that of dense matrices, mostly due to the fact that the compression formats required to efficiently store sparse matrices mismatches traditional computing architectures. This paper describes an FPGA-based SpMxV kernel that is scalable to efficiently utilize the available memory bandwidth and computing resources. Benchmarking on a Virtex-5 SX95T FPGA demonstrates an average computational efficiency of 91.85%. The kernel achieves a peak computational efficiency of 99.8%, a >50x improvement over two Intel Core i7 processors (i7-2600 and i7-4770) and showing a >300x improvement over two NVIDA GPUs (GTX 660 and GTX Titan), when running the MKL and cuSPARSE sparse-BLAS libraries, respectively. In addition, the SpMxV FPGA kernel is able to achieve higher performance than its CPU and GPU counterparts, while using only 64 single-precision processing elements, with an overall 38-50x improvement in energy efficiency.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Title of host publicationFPGA 2014 - Proceedings of the 2014 ACM/SIGDA International Symposium on Field Programmable Gate Arrays
PublisherAssociation for Computing Machinery
Pages161-169
Number of pages9
ISBN (Print)9781450326711
DOIs
StatePublished - 2014
Externally publishedYes
Event2014 ACM/SIGDA International Symposium on Field Programmable Gate Arrays, FPGA 2014 - Monterey, CA, United States
Duration: Feb 26 2014Feb 28 2014

Publication series

NameACM/SIGDA International Symposium on Field Programmable Gate Arrays - FPGA

Other

Other2014 ACM/SIGDA International Symposium on Field Programmable Gate Arrays, FPGA 2014
Country/TerritoryUnited States
CityMonterey, CA
Period2/26/142/28/14

Keywords

  • Benchmarking
  • CPU
  • Computational efficiency
  • Energy-efficiency
  • FPGA
  • GPU
  • SpMxV
  • Sparse-BLAS

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • General Computer Science

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