SparTen: Leveraging Kokkos for On-node Parallelism in a Second-Order Method for Fitting Canonical Polyadic Tensor Models to Poisson Data

Canonical Polyadic tensor decomposition using alternate Poisson regression (CP-APR) is an effective analysis tool for large sparse count datasets. One of the variants using projected damped Newton optimization for row subproblems (PDNR) offers quadratic convergence and is amenable to parallelization. Despite its potential effectiveness, PDNR performance on modern high performance computing (HPC) systems is not well understood. To remedy this, we have developed a parallel implementation of PDNR using Kokkos, a performance portable parallel programming framework supporting efficient runtime of a single code base on multiple HPC systems. We demonstrate that the performance of parallel PDNR can be poor if load imbalance associated with the irregular distribution of nonzero entries in the tensor data is not addressed. Preliminary results using tensors from the FROSTT data set indicate that using multiple kernels to address this imbalance when solving the PDNR row subproblems in parallel can improve performance, with up to 80% speedup on CPUs and 10-fold speedup on NVIDIA GPUs.