A novel CSR-based sparse matrix-vector multiplication on GPUs

Abstract

Sparse matrix-vector multiplication (SpMV) is an important operation in scientific computations. Compressed sparse row (CSR) is the most frequently used format to store sparse matrices. However, CSR-based SpMVs on graphic processing units (GPUs), for example, CSR-scalar and CSR-vector, usually have poor performance due to irregular memory access patterns. This motivates us to propose a perfect CSR-based SpMV on the GPU that is called PCSR. PCSR involves two kernels and accesses CSR arrays in a fully coalesced manner by introducing a middle array, which greatly alleviates the deficiencies of CSR-scalar (rare coalescing) and CSR-vector (partial coalescing). Test results on a single C2050 GPU show that PCSR fully outperforms CSR-scalar, CSR-vector, and CSRMV and HYBMV in the vendor-tuned CUSPARSE library and is comparable with a most recently proposed CSR-based algorithm, CSR-Adaptive. Furthermore, we extend PCSR on a single GPU to multiple GPUs. Experimental results on four C2050 GPUs show that no matter whether the communication between GPUs is considered or not PCSR on multiple GPUs achieves good performance and has high parallel efficiency.