Sparse Stream Semantic Registers: A Lightweight ISA Extension Accelerating General Sparse Linear Algebra

Sparse linear algebra is crucial in many application domains, but challenging to handle efficiently in both software and hardware, with one- and two-sided operand sparsity handled with distinct approaches. In this work, we enhance an existing memory-streaming RISC-V ISA extension to accelerate both one- and two-sided operand sparsity on widespread sparse tensor formats like compressed sparse row (CSR) and compressed sparse fiber (CSF) by accelerating the underlying operations of streaming indirection, intersection, and union. Our extensions enable single-core speedups over an optimized RISC-V baseline of up to 7.0x, 7.7x, and 9.8x on sparse-dense multiply, sparse-sparse multiply, and sparse-sparse addition, respectively, and peak FPU utilizations of up to 80% on sparse-dense problems. On an eight-core cluster, sparse-dense and sparse-sparse matrix-vector multiply using real-world matrices are up to 4.9x and 5.9x faster and up to 2.9x and 3.0x more energy efficient. We explore further applications for our extensions, such as stencil codes and graph pattern matching. Compared to recent CPU, GPU, and accelerator approaches, our extensions enable higher flexibility on data representation, degree of sparsity, and dataflow at a minimal hardware footprint, adding only 1.8% in area to a compute cluster. A cluster with our extensions running CSR matrix-vector multiplication achieves 9.9x and 1.7x higher peak floating-point utilizations than recent highly optimized sparse data structures and libraries for CPU and GPU, respectively, even when accounting for off-chip main memory (HBM) and on-chip interconnect latency and bandwidth effects.