Synergistic CPU-FPGA Acceleration of Sparse Linear Algebra

This paper describes REAP, a software-hardware approach that enables high performance sparse linear algebra computations on a cooperative CPU-FPGA platform. REAP carefully separates the task of organizing the matrix elements from the computation phase. It uses the CPU to provide a first-pass re-organization of the matrix elements, allowing the FPGA to focus on the computation. We introduce a new intermediate representation that allows the CPU to communicate the sparse data and the scheduling decisions to the FPGA. The computation is optimized on the FPGA for effective resource utilization with pipelining. REAP improves the performance of Sparse General Matrix Multiplication (SpGEMM) and Sparse Cholesky Factorization by 3.2X and 1.85X compared to widely used sparse libraries for them on the CPU, respectively.