HPMaX: heterogeneous parallel matrix multiplication using CPUs and GPUs

We present a novel heterogeneous parallel matrix multiplication algorithm that utilizes both central processing units (CPUs) and graphics processing units (GPUs) for large-scale matrices. Based on Strassen’s method, we represent matrix multiplication work as a set of matrix addition and multiplication tasks among their sub-matrices. Then, we distribute the tasks to CPUs and GPUs while considering the characteristics of the tasks and computing resources to minimize the data communication overhead and fully utilize the available computing power. To handle a large matrix efficiently with limited GPU memory, we also propose a block-based work decomposition method. We then further improve the performance of our method by exploiting the concurrent execution abilities of a heterogeneous parallel computing system. We implemented our method on five different heterogeneous systems and applied it to matrices of various sizes. Our method generally shows higher performance than the prior GPU-based matrix multiplication methods. Moreover, compared with the state-of-the-art GPU matrix multiplication library (i.e., CUBLAS), our method achieved up to 1.97 times higher performance using the same GPUs and CPU cores. In some cases, our method using a low-performance GPU (e.g., GTX 1060, 3 GB) achieved performance comparable to that of CUBLAS using a high-performance GPU (e.g., RTX 2080, 8 GB). Also, our method continually improves performance as we use more computing resources like additional CPU cores and GPUs. We could achieve such high performance because our approach fully utilized the capacities of the given heterogeneous parallel computing systems while employing the Strassen’s method, which has a lower asymptotic complexity. These results demonstrate the efficiency and robustness of our algorithm.