mtGEMM: An Efficient GEMM Library for Modern Multi-Core DSPs

The General Matrix Multiplication (GEMM) is a crucial subprogram in high-performance computing (HPC). With the increasing importance of power and energy consumption, modern Digital Signal Processors (DSPs) are being integrated into general-purpose HPC systems. However, due to architecture disparities, traditional optimizations for CPUs and GPUs are not easily applicable to modern DSPs. This paper shares our experience of optimizing the GEMM operation using a CPU-DSP platform as a case study. Our work employs a set of strategies to improve the performance and scalability of GEMM. These strategies focus on developing micro-kernels based on heterogeneous on-chip memory, addressing the memory access bottleneck in multi-core parallelism, and facilitating efficient transpose-GEMM. These approaches, collectively referred to as an efficient and practical library (a.k.a.mtGEMM), maximize computational capabilities and bandwidth utilization of multi-core DSPs, while achieving high performance for variously-shaped GEMMs. Our experimental results demonstrate thatmtGEMMcan attain between 92% and 96% of the hardware peak, with the multi-core scalability being almost linear.