# ScalableHD: Scalable and High-Throughput Hyperdimensional Computing Inference on Multi-Core CPUs

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.09282 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.09282/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 17 of its 71 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 10 Jun 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 17 of 17)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6980/) (2014)
- [Learned Step Size Quantization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.08153/) (2019)
- [A White Paper on Neural Network Quantization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.08295/) (2021)
- [A Survey on Hyperdimensional Computing aka Vector Symbolic Architectures, Part I: Models and Data Transformations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.06077/) (2021)
- [ECG Heartbeat Classification: A Deep Transferable Representation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.00794/) (2018)
- [A Survey on Hyperdimensional Computing aka Vector Symbolic Architectures, Part II: Applications, Cognitive Models, and Challenges](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.15424/) (2021)
- [Hyperdimensional computing as a framework for systematic aggregation of image descriptors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.07720/) (2021)
- [Torchhd: An Open Source Python Library to Support Research on Hyperdimensional Computing and Vector Symbolic Architectures](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.09208/) (2022)
- [Hypervector Design for Efficient Hyperdimensional Computing on Edge Devices](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.06709/) (2021)
- [HDTorch: Accelerating Hyperdimensional Computing with GP-GPUs for Design Space Exploration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.04746/) (2022)
- [An Encoding Framework for Binarized Images using HyperDimensional Computing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.00454/) (2023)
- [Hyperdimensional Representation Learning for Node Classification and Link Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.17073/) (2024)
- [HPVM-HDC: A Heterogeneous Programming System for Accelerating Hyperdimensional Computing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.15179/) (2024)
- [HDCC: A Hyperdimensional Computing compiler for classification on embedded systems and high-performance computing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.12398/) (2023)
- [Real-time Hyper-Dimensional Reconfiguration at the Edge using Hardware Accelerators](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.05128/) (2022)
- [Hardware-Aware Static Optimization of Hyperdimensional Computations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.03335/) (2023)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Hyperdimensional Computing (HDC) is a brain-inspired computing paradigm that represents and manipulates information using high-dimensional vectors, called hypervectors (HV). Traditional HDC methods, while robust to noise and inherently parallel, rely on single-pass, non-parametric training and often suffer from low accuracy. To address this, recent approaches adopt iterative training of base and class HVs, typically accelerated on GPUs. Inference, however, remains lightweight and well-suited for real-time execution. Yet, efficient HDC inference has been studied almost exclusively on specialized hardware such as FPGAs and GPUs, with limited attention to general-purpose multi-core CPUs. To address this gap, we propose ScalableHD for scalable and high-throughput HDC inference on multi-core CPUs. ScalableHD employs a two-stage pipelined execution model, where each stage is parallelized across cores and processes chunks of base and class HVs. Intermediate results are streamed between stages using a producer-consumer mechanism, enabling on-the-fly consumption and improving cache locality. To maximize performance, ScalableHD integrates memory tiling and NUMA-aware worker-to-core binding. Further, it features two execution variants tailored for small and large batch sizes, each designed to exploit compute parallelism based on workload characteristics while mitigating the memory-bound compute pattern that limits HDC inference performance on modern multi-core CPUs. ScalableHD achieves up to 10x speedup in throughput (samples per second) over state-of-the-art baselines such as TorchHD, across a diverse set of tasks ranging from human activity recognition to image classification, while preserving task accuracy. Furthermore, ScalableHD exhibits robust scalability: increasing the number of cores yields near-proportional throughput improvements.