NM-SpMM: Accelerating Matrix Multiplication Using N:M Sparsity with GPGPU
Abstract
Deep learning demonstrates effectiveness across a wide range of tasks. However, the dense and over-parameterized nature of these models results in significant resource consumption during deployment. In response to this issue, weight pruning, particularly through N:M sparsity matrix multiplication, offers an efficient solution by transforming dense operations into semi-sparse ones. N:M sparsity provides an option for balancing performance and model accuracy, but introduces more complex programming and optimization challenges. To address these issues, we design a systematic top-down performance analysis model for N:M sparsity. Meanwhile, NM-SpMM is proposed as an efficient general N:M sparsity implementation. Based on our performance analysis, NM-SpMM employs a hierarchical blocking mechanism as a general optimization to enhance data locality, while memory access optimization and pipeline design are introduced as sparsity-aware optimization, allowing it to achieve close-to-theoretical peak performance across different sparsity levels. Experimental results show that NM-SpMM is 2.1x faster than nmSPARSE (the state-of-the-art for general N:M sparsity) and 1.4x to 6.3x faster than cuBLAS's dense GEMM operations, closely approaching the theoretical maximum speedup resulting from the reduction in computation due to sparsity. NM-SpMM is open source and publicly available at https://github.com/M-H482/NM-SpMM.
Cite
@article{arxiv.2503.01253,
title = {NM-SpMM: Accelerating Matrix Multiplication Using N:M Sparsity with GPGPU},
author = {Cong Ma and Du Wu and Zhelang Deng and Jiang Chen and Xiaowen Huang and Jintao Meng and Wenxi Zhu and Bingqiang Wang and Amelie Chi Zhou and Peng Chen and Minwen Deng and Yanjie Wei and Shengzhong Feng and Yi Pan},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2503.01253},
year = {2025}
}
Comments
12 pages, 10 figures, accepted at IPDPS 2025. Code: https://github.com/M-H482/NM-SpMM