SRSparse: Generating Codes for High-Performance Sparse Matrix-Vector Semiring Computations

Sparse matrix-vector semiring computation is a key operation in sparse matrix computations, with performance strongly dependent on both program design and the features of the sparse matrices. Given the diversity of sparse matrices, designing a tailored program for each matrix is challenging. To address this, we propose SRSparse1 an program generator that creates tailored programs by automatically combining program designing methods to fit specific input matrices. It provides two components: the problem definition configuration, which declares the computation, and the scheduling language, which can be leveraged by an auto-tuner to specify the program designs. The two are lowered to the intermediate representations of SRSparse, the Format IR and Kernel IR, which respectively generates format conversion routine and kernel code. We evaluate SRSparse on four representative sparse kernels and three format conversion routines. For sparse kernels, SRSparse achieves median speedups over handwritten programs: COO (3.50 ×), CSR-Adaptive (5.36 ×), CSR5 (2.06 ×), ELL (1.63 ×), Gunrock (1.57 ×), and GraphBLAST (1.96 ×); over an auto-tuner: AlphaSparse (1.16 ×); and over a compiler: TACO (1.71 ×). For format conversion routines, SRSparse achieves median speedups over handwritten implementations: Intel MKL (7.60 ×), SPARSKIT (2.61 ×), CUSP (2.77 ×), and Ginkgo (1.74 ×); and over a compiler: TACO (4.04 ×).