STOMP: Statistical Techniques for Optimizing and Modeling Performance of Blocked Sparse Matrix Vector Multiplication

Sparse-matrix vector multiplication (SpMV) is the core compute routine for several scientific and commercial codebases. Because of its extremely irregular memory accesses (low temporal locality), indirect memory referencing (low spatial locality), low arithmetic intensity, and the non-zero pattern and non-zero density of the matrix, SpMV achieves a mere 10% of peak system performance. Because sparse matrices have extremely varied non-zero patterns and densities, performance of SpMV is hard to predict. Blocking sparse matrices increases arithmetic intensity and spatial locality during SpMV operations, thereby improving SpMV performance. However, selection of an incorrect block size can produce performance degradation as high as 70%. In this study, we describe the STOMP approach of using statistical techniques to predict run time of SpMV in PETSc for new matrices with mean accuracy of 93.52%. We use these statistical prediction models to guide block size selection to achieve up to 100% of optimal performance, comparable to that attained through exhaustive block size search. Our block size selection results produce an average of 55.56% speedup over default SpMV options. On the same set of matrices used in the SPARSITY SpMV framework, STOMP yields a 54.46% speedup while SPARSITY yields a 31.62% speedup over the same default.