SC19 Proceedings

The International Conference for High Performance Computing, Networking, Storage, and Analysis

Conflict-Free Symmetric Sparse Matrix-Vector Multiplication on Multicore Architectures


Authors: Athena Elafrou (National Technical University of Athens), Georgios Goumas (National Technical University of Athens), Nectarios Koziris (National Technical University of Athens)

Abstract: Exploiting the numeric symmetry in sparse matrices to reduce their memory footprint is very tempting for optimizing the memory-bound Sparse Matrix-Vector Multiplication (SpMV) kernel. Despite being very beneficial for serial computation, storing the upper or lower triangular part of the matrix introduces race conditions in the updates to the output vector in a parallel execution. Previous work has suggested using local, per-thread vectors to circumvent this problem, introducing a work-inefficient reduction step that limits the scalability of SpMV. In this paper, we address this issue with Conflict-Free Symmetric (CFS) SpMV, an optimization strategy that organizes the parallel computation into phases of conflict-free execution. We identify such phases through graph coloring and propose heuristics to improve the coloring quality for SpMV in terms of load balancing and locality to the input and output vectors. We evaluate our approach on two multicore shared-memory systems and demonstrate improved performance over the state-of-the-art.


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