Efficient processing of Irregular Matrices on Single Instruction, Multiple Data (SIMD)-type architectures is a persistent challenge. Resolving it requires innovations in the development of data formats, computational techniques, and implementations that strike a balance between thread divergence, which is inherent for Irregular Matrices, and padding, which alleviates the performance-detrimental thread divergence but introduces artificial overheads. To this end, in this article, we address the challenge of designing high performance sparse matrix-vector product (S p MV) kernels designed for Nvidia Graphics Processing Units (GPUs). We present a compressed sparse row (CSR) format suitable for unbalanced matrices. We also provide a load-balancing kernel for the coordinate (COO) matrix format and extend it to a hybrid algorithm that stores part of the matrix in SIMD-friendly Ellpack format (ELL) format. The ratio between the ELL- and the COO-part is determined using a theoretical analysis of the nonzeros-per-row distribution. For the over 2,800 test matrices available in the Suite Sparse matrix collection, we compare the performance against S p MV kernels provided by NVIDIA’s cuSPARSE library and a heavily-tuned sliced ELL (SELL-P) kernel that prevents unnecessary padding by considering the irregular matrices as a combination of matrix blocks stored in ELL format.

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Ginkgo is a production-ready sparse linear algebra library for high performance computing on GPU-centric architectures with a high level of performance portability and focuses on software sustainability.

In this article, we present Ginkgo , a modern C++ math library for scientific high performance computing. While classical linear algebra libraries act on matrix and vector objects, Ginkgo ’s design principle abstracts all functionality as “linear operators,” motivating the notation of a “linear operator algebra library.” Ginkgo ’s current focus is oriented toward providing sparse linear algebra functionality for high performance graphics processing unit (GPU) architectures, but given the library design, this focus can be easily extended to accommodate other algorithms and hardware architectures. We introduce this sophisticated software architecture that separates core algorithms from architecture-specific backends and provide details on extensibility and sustainability measures. We also demonstrate Ginkgo ’s usability by providing examples on how to use its functionality inside the MFEM and deal.ii finite element ecosystems. Finally, we offer a practical demonstration of Ginkgo ’s high performance on state-of-the-art GPU architectures.