Multiplication of medium-density matrices using TensorFlow on multicore CPUs

Abstract

Matrix multiplication is an essential part of many applications, such as linear algebra, image processing and machine learning. One platform used in such applications is TensorFlow, which is a machine learning library whose structure is based on dataflow programming paradigm. In this work, a method for multiplication of medium-density matrices on multicore CPUs using TensorFlow platform is proposed. This method, called tbt_matmul, utilizes TensorFlow built-in methods tf.matmul and tf.sparse_matmul. By partitioning each input matrix into four smaller sub-matrices, called tiles, and applying an appropriate multiplication method to each pair depending on their density, the proposed method outperforms the built-in methods for matrices of medium density and matrices of significantly uneven distribution of non-zeros.