Machine learning approach for the predicting performance of SpMV on GPU

Sparse Matrix-Vector Multiplication (SpMV) kernel dominates the computing cost in numerous scientific applications. Many implementations based on different sparse formats were proposed recently for optimizing this kernel on the GPU side. Since the performance of the SpMV varies significantly according to the sparsity characteristics of the input matrix and the hardware features, developing an accurate performance model for this kernel is a challenging task. The traditional approach of building such models by analytical modeling is difficult in practice and requires a thorough understanding of the interaction between the GPU hardware and the sparse code. In this paper, we propose to use a machine learning approach to predict the performance of the SpMV kernel using several sparse formats (COO, CSR, ELL, and HYB) on GPU. We used two popular machine learning algorithms, Support Vector Regression (SVR) and Multilayer Perceptron neural network (MLP). Our experimental results on two different GPUs (Fermi GTX 512 and Maxwell GTX 980 Ti) show that the SVR models deliver the best accuracy with average prediction error ranging between 7% and 14%.