N:M sparsity is becoming increasingly popular for its potential to deliver high model accuracy and computational efficiency for deep learning. However, the real-world benefit of N:M sparsity is limited as there is a lack of dedicated GPU kernel implementations for general N:M sparsity with various sparsity ratios. In this work, we introduce nmSPARSE, a library of efficient GPU kernels for two fundamental operations in neural networks with N:M sparse weights: sparse matrix-vector multiplication (SpMV) and sparse matrix-matrix multiplication (SpMM). By exploiting the intrinsic balance characteristic of N:M sparsity, nmSPARSE kernels rearrange irregular computation and scattered memory accesses in sparse matrix multiplication into hardware-aligned regular computation and conflict-free memory accesses at runtime. When evaluated on NVIDIA A100 GPU, nmSPARSE kernels achieve up to 5.2\u00d7 speedup on SpMV and 6.0\u00d7 speedup on SpMM over the fastest baseline. End-to-end studies on transformer models demonstrate that using nmSPARSE outperforms other baselines.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
N:M sparsity is becoming increasingly popular for its potential to deliver high model accuracy and computational efficiency for deep learning. However, the real-world benefit of N:M sparsity is limited as there is a lack of dedicated GPU kernel implementations for general N:M sparsity with various sparsity ratios. In this work, we introduce nmSPARSE, a library 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