Adaptive Strassen's matrix multiplication

  • Authors:

  • Paolo D'Alberto;Alexandru Nicolau

  • Affiliations:

  • Yahoo! Sunnyvale, CA;University of California, Irvine

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the 21st annual international conference on Supercomputing
  • Year:
  • 2007

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Abstract

Strassen's matrix multiplication (MM) has benefits with respect to any (highly tuned) implementations of MM because Strassen's reduces the total number of operations. Strassen achieved this operation reduction by replacing computationally expensive MMs with matrix additions (MAs). For architectures with simple memory hierarchies, having fewer operations directly translates into an efficient utilization of the CPU and, thus, faster execution. However, for modern architectures with complex memory hierarchies, the operations introduced by the MAs have a limited in-cache data reuse and thus poor memory-hierarchy utilization, thereby overshadowing the (improved) CPU utilization, and making Strassen's algorithm (largely) useless on its own. In this paper, we investigate the interaction between Strassen's effective performance and the memory-hierarchy organization. We show how to exploit Strassen's full potential across different architectures. We present an easy-to-use adaptive algorithm that combines a novel implementation of Strassen's idea with the MM from automatically tuned linear algebra software (ATLAS) or GotoBLAS. An additional advantage of our algorithm is that it applies to any size and shape matrices and works equally well with row or column major layout. Our implementation consists of introducing a final step in the ATLAS/GotoBLAS-installation process that estimates whether or not we can achieve any additional speedup using our Strassen's adaptation algorithm. Then we install our codes, validate our estimates, and determine the specific performance. We show that, by the right combination of Strassen's with ATLAS/GotoBLAS, our approach achieves up to 30%/22% speed-up versus ATLAS/GotoBLAS alone on modern high-performance single processors. We consider and present the complexity and the numerical analysis of our algorithm, and, finally, we show performance for 17 (uniprocessor) systems.