Streaming Sparse Data on Architectures with Vector Extensions using Near Data Processing
Pranathi Vasireddy, Krishna M. Kavi, Alex Weaver, Gayatri Mehta · Proceedings of the International Symposium on Memory Systems · 2023
Most scientific and AI applications rely on data that is usually sparse. Sparsity is sometimes deliberately introduced with pruning of insignificant and redundant connections in the neural network layers. This sparse data can efficiently be represented through various compression formats, thereby, reducing storage footprint and eliminating computations with zero values. However, accessing nonzero values introduces extra computational overhead.