Run-Time Optimization of Sparse Matrix-Vector Multiplication on SIMD Machines

Sparse matrix-vector multiplication forms the heart of iterative linear solvers used widely in scientific computations (e.g., finite element methods). In such solvers, the matrix-vector product is computed repeatedly, often thousands of times, with updated values of the vector until convergence is achieved. In an SIMD architecture, each processor has to fetch the updated off-processor vector elements while computing its share of the product. In this paper, we report on run-time optimization of array distribution and off-processor data fetching to reduce both the communication and computation time. The optimization is applied to a sparse matrix stored in a compressed sparse row-wise format. Actual runs on test matrices produced up to a 35 percent relative improvement over a block distribution with a naive multiplication algorithm while simulations over a wider range of processors indicate that up to a 60 percent improvement may be possible in some cases.