SMEStencil: Optimizing High-Order Stencils on ARM Multicore Using SME Unit

Matrix-accelerated stencil computation is a hot research topic, yet its application to 3 dimensional (3D) high-order stencils and HPC remains underexplored. With the emergence of Scalable Matrix Extension(SME) on ARMv9-A CPU, we analyze SME-based accelerating strategies and tailor an optimal approach for 3D high-order stencils. We introduce algorithmic optimizations based on Scalable Vector Extension(SVE) and SME unit to address strided memory accesses, alignment conflicts, and redundant accesses. We propose memory optimizations to boost on-package memory efficiency, and a novel multi-thread parallelism paradigm to overcome data-sharing challenges caused by the absence of shared data caches. SMEStencil sustains consistently high hardware utilization across diverse stencil shapes and dimensions. Our DMA-based inter-NUMA communication further mitigates NUMA effects and MPI limitations in hybrid parallelism. Combining all the innovations, SMEStencil outperforms state-of-the-art libraries on Nividia A100 GPGPU by up to 2.1× . Moreover, the performance improvements enabled by our optimizations translate directly to real-world HPC applications and enable Reverse Time Migration(RTM) real-world applications to yield 1.8x speedup versus highly-optimized Nvidia A100 GPGPU version.