Block iterators for sparse matrices

Finding an optimal block size for a given sparse matrix forms an important problem for storage formats that partition matrices into uniformly-sized blocks. Finding a solution to this problem can take a significant amount of time, which, effectively, may negate the benefits that such a format brings into sparse-matrix computations. A key for an efficient solution is the ability to quickly iterate, for a particular block size, over matrix nonzero blocks. This work proposes an efficient parallel algorithm for this task and evaluate it experimentally on modern multi-core and many-core high performance computing (HPC) architectures.