Vector ISA Extension for Sparse Matrix-Vector Multiplication

In this paper we introduce a vector ISA extension to facilitate sparse matrix manipulation on vector processors (VPs). First we introduce a new Block Based Compressed Storage (BBCS) format for sparse matrix representation and a Block-wise Sparse Matrix-Vector Multiplication approach. Additionally, we propose two vector instructions, Multiple Inner Product and Accumulate (MIPA) and LoaD Section (LDS), specially tuned to increase the VP performance when executing sparse matrix-vector multiplications.