Sextans: A Streaming Accelerator for General-Purpose Sparse-Matrix Dense-Matrix Multiplication

Abstract

Sparse-Matrix Dense-Matrix multiplication (SpMM) is the key operator for a wide range of applications including scientific computing, graph processing, and deep learning. Architecting accelerators for SpMM is faced with three challenges - (1) the random memory accessing and unbalanced load in processing because of random distribution of elements in sparse matrices, (2) inefficient data handling of the large matrices which can not be fit on-chip, and (3) a non-general-purpose accelerator design where one accelerator can only process a fixed-size problem.