NVIDIA Corporation
TILED COMPRESSED SPARSE MATRIX FORMAT

Abstract:

Approaches in accordance with various embodiments provide for the processing of sparse matrices for mathematical and programmatic operations. In particular, various embodiments utilize a tiling approach that divides a sparse matrix into submatrices, many of which will include only zero-value entities. These empty tiles can be ignored, and only the tiles with non-zero entries processed, which reduces resource and time requirements for the processing. An indexing approach can be used for each entity that is a combination of the tile identifier and an offset value, which enables the values to be multiplied correctly against, for example, values of a dense matrix. The tiles can be processed in parallel and the results accumulated to generate a matrix product. The matrix product can then be passed to the next step in a process or operation, such as to a next layer in a deep neural network.