We develop a family of parallel algorithms for the SpKAdd operation that adds a collection of k sparse matrices. SpKAdd is a much needed operation in many applications including distributed memory sparse matrix-matrix multiplication (SpGEMM), streaming accumulations of graphs, and algorithmic sparsification of the gradient updates in deep learning. While adding two sparse matrices is a common operation in Matlab, Python, Intel MKL, and various GraphBLAS libraries, these implementations do not perform well when adding a large collection of sparse matrices. We develop a series of algorithms using tree merging, heap, sparse accumulator, hash table, and sliding hash table data structures. Among them, hash-based algorithms attain the theoretical lower bounds both on the computational and I/O complexities and perform the best in practice. The newlydeveloped hash SpKAdd makes the computation of a distributedmemory SpGEMM algorithm at least 2x faster than that the previous state-of-the-art algorithms.
Combinatorial algorithms such as those that arise in graph analysis, modeling of discrete systems, bioinformatics, and chemistry, are often hard to parallelize. The Combinatorial BLAS library implements key computational primitives for rapid development of combinatorial algorithms in distributed-memory systems. During the decade since its first introduction, the Combinatorial BLAS library has evolved and expanded significantly. This paper details many of the key technical features of Combinatorial BLAS version 2.0, such as communication avoidance, hierarchical parallelism via in-node multithreading, accelerator support via GPU kernels, generalized semiring support, implementations of key data structures and functions, and scalable distributed I/O operations for human-readable files. Our paper also presents several rules of thumb for choosing the right data structures and functions in Combinatorial BLAS 2.0, under various common application scenarios.
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