CoSpMV: Towards Agile Software and Hardware Co-Design for SpMV Computation

Sparse Matrix-Vector multiplication (SpMV) is a widely used kernel in scientific or engineering applications and it is commonly implemented in FPGAs for acceleration. Existing works on FPGA usually pre-process the sparse matrix for data compression from the software perspective, and then design a unified architecture from the hardware perspective. However, as different SpMV kernels expose different levels of data parallelism after software processing, a unified architecture may not efficiently tap the underlying parallelism exposed in a specific kernel, leading to poor bandwidth utilization (BU) or poor resource utilization. To this end, this paper proposes an agile software and hardware co-design framework, CoSpMV, that employs design space exploration on both software and hardware for a specific kernel. Specifically, by providing a scalable compressed data format and a highly pipelined hardware template, CoSpMV can select the most suitable software and hardware configurations for different kernels and generate the accelerator instantly. The experimental results show that CoSpMV can achieve 3.91$\times$ speedup on GFLOPs, and 1.31$\times$ speedup on BU compared to the state-of-the-art work.