Sparm: A Sparse Matrix Multiplication Accelerator Supporting Multiple Dataflows

As the main workload of many scientific and machine learning applications, sparse matrix-matrix multiplication (spGEMM) has become a hot research field. The current spG EMM workloads exhibit sparsity and irregularity, leading to computational inefficiencies on traditional hardware platforms and motivating numerous customized accelerators. These spe-cialized hardware designs typically accelerate only one type of spGEMM dataflow (such as Inner-Product, Outer-Product, or Gustavson), yet the computational efficiency of the same spG EMM kernel can vary significantly under different dataflows. Flexagon is the first spGEMM accelerator to support multiple dataflows, but its MRN (Merger-Reduction Network) design causes a lot of data blocking and load imbalance, which limits its performance. In this work, we propose Sparm, which achieves efficient merging of psums (partial sums) for different dataflows through a specialized indexing unit. Sparm addresses the performance bottlenecks encountered by Flexagon when facing highly sparse matrices. Furthermore, Sparm employs a row/column prefetcher to load the streaming matrices proactively and thus significantly reduces the amount of DRAM access. We conduct simulations using a cycle-accurate simulator on workloads from various application domains, and the results demonstrate that Sparm achieves average performance gains of 2.62× and 1.35× compared to state-of-the-art spGEMM accelerators SIGMA and Flexagon. Meanwhile, Sparm brings only a small amount of additional hardware overhead over Flexagon.