The automatic generation of sparse primitives

  • Authors:
  • Aart J. C. Bik;Peter J. H. Brinkhaus;Peter M. W. Knijnenburg;Harry A. G. Wijshoff

  • Affiliations:
  • Leiden Univ., Leiden, The Netherlands;Leiden Univ., Leiden, The Netherlands;Leiden Univ., Leiden, The Netherlands;Leiden Univ., Leiden, The Netherlands

  • Venue:
  • ACM Transactions on Mathematical Software (TOMS)
  • Year:
  • 1998

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Abstract

Primitives in mathematical software are usually written and optimized by hand. With the implementation of a “sparse compiler” that is capable of automatically converting a dense program into sparse code, however, a completely different approach to the generation of sparse primitives can be taken. A dense implementation of a particular primitive is supplied to the sparse compiler, after which it can be converted into many different sparse versions of this primitive. Each version is specifically tailored to a class of sparse matrices having a specific nonzero structure. In this article, we discuss some of our experiences with this new approach.