Optimization of sparse matrix–vector multiplication using reordering techniques on GPUs

It is well-known that reordering techniques applied to sparse matrices are common strategies to improve the performance of sparse matrix operations, and particularly, the sparse matrix vector multiplication (SpMV) on CPUs.In this paper, we have evaluated some of the most successful reordering techniques on two different GPUs. In addition, in our study a number of sparse matrix storage formats were considered. Executions for both single and double precision arithmetics were also performed.We have found that SpMV is very sensitive to the application of reordering techniques on GPUs. In particular, several characteristics of the reordered matrices that have a big impact on the SpMV performance have been detected. In most of the cases, reordered matrices outperform the original ones, showing noticeable speedups up to 2.6×. We have also observed that there is no one storage format preferred over the others.