cuTeSpMM: Accelerating Sparse-Dense Matrix Multiplication using GPU Tensor Cores

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Main Authors: Xiang, Lizhi, Asudeh, Omid, Sabin, Gerald, Sukumaran-Rajam, Aravind, Sadayappan, P.
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Xiang, Lizhi
Asudeh, Omid
Sabin, Gerald
Sukumaran-Rajam, Aravind
Sadayappan, P.
author_facet Xiang, Lizhi
Asudeh, Omid
Sabin, Gerald
Sukumaran-Rajam, Aravind
Sadayappan, P.
contents Many recent GPUs feature matrix multiplication engines (aka Tensor Core Units or TCUs) that perform small fixed-size matrix-matrix products at very high throughput. They have been used very effectively to speed up dense matrix-matrix multiplication libraries like Nvidia's cuBLAS, enabling significantly higher performance over use of the traditional scalar GPU cores. There also been recent interest in using these dense TCUs for the important sparse-dense matrix-matrix multiplication (SpMM) kernel via explicit zero-filling. However, an examination of the attainable performance of TC-GNN, the state-of-the-art TCU-enhanced SpMM implementation, indicates that for a substantial majority of the sparse matrices in the SuiteSparse collection, the achieved performance falls significantly short of the state-of-the-art SpMM kernels that only utilize scalar cores. In this paper, we therefore address the question: Can dense TCUs be effectively used to accelerate SpMM for a range of sparse matrices arising from multiple application domains, such as those found in the SuiteSparse matrix collection? We answer this question in the affirmative by developing a very efficient TCU-based GPU kernel - cuTeSpMM (cuda Tensor core SpMM) that achieves substantially higher performance over TC-GNN. We also develop a notion of the TCU-Synergy of a sparse-matrix, based on its non-zero structure and a modeled Operational Intensity. For sparse matrices with high TCU-synergy, cuTeSpMM outperforms state-of-the-art scalar-core SpMM implementations, while achieving only slightly lower performance on matrices with low TCU-Synergy.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2504_06443
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle cuTeSpMM: Accelerating Sparse-Dense Matrix Multiplication using GPU Tensor Cores
Xiang, Lizhi
Asudeh, Omid
Sabin, Gerald
Sukumaran-Rajam, Aravind
Sadayappan, P.
Performance
Many recent GPUs feature matrix multiplication engines (aka Tensor Core Units or TCUs) that perform small fixed-size matrix-matrix products at very high throughput. They have been used very effectively to speed up dense matrix-matrix multiplication libraries like Nvidia's cuBLAS, enabling significantly higher performance over use of the traditional scalar GPU cores. There also been recent interest in using these dense TCUs for the important sparse-dense matrix-matrix multiplication (SpMM) kernel via explicit zero-filling. However, an examination of the attainable performance of TC-GNN, the state-of-the-art TCU-enhanced SpMM implementation, indicates that for a substantial majority of the sparse matrices in the SuiteSparse collection, the achieved performance falls significantly short of the state-of-the-art SpMM kernels that only utilize scalar cores. In this paper, we therefore address the question: Can dense TCUs be effectively used to accelerate SpMM for a range of sparse matrices arising from multiple application domains, such as those found in the SuiteSparse matrix collection? We answer this question in the affirmative by developing a very efficient TCU-based GPU kernel - cuTeSpMM (cuda Tensor core SpMM) that achieves substantially higher performance over TC-GNN. We also develop a notion of the TCU-Synergy of a sparse-matrix, based on its non-zero structure and a modeled Operational Intensity. For sparse matrices with high TCU-synergy, cuTeSpMM outperforms state-of-the-art scalar-core SpMM implementations, while achieving only slightly lower performance on matrices with low TCU-Synergy.
title cuTeSpMM: Accelerating Sparse-Dense Matrix Multiplication using GPU Tensor Cores
topic Performance
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2504.06443