Out-of-Step Pipeline for Gather/Scatter Instructions

Abstract

Wider SIMD units suffer from low scalability of gather/scatter instructions that appear in sparse matrix calculations. We address this problem with an out-of-step pipeline which tolerates bank conflicts of a multibank L1D by allowing element operations of SIMD instructions to proceed out of step with each other. We evaluated it with a sparse matrix-vector product kernel for matrices from HPCG and SuiteSparse Matrix Collection. The results show that, for the SIMD width of 1024 bit, it achieves 1.91 times improvement over a model of a conventional pipeline.