arXiv subjects

Youxuan Xu

Publications and source records attributed to Youxuan Xu.

4 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2025

Libra: Unleashing GPU Heterogeneity for High-Performance Sparse Matrix Multiplication

Sparse matrix multiplication operators (i.e., SpMM and SDDMM) are widely used in deep learning and scientific computing. Modern accelerators are commonly equipped with Tensor Core Units (TCUs) and CUDA cores to accelerate sparse operators. The former excels at structured matrix computations, whereas the latter offers greater programming flexibility. However, how to combine these two resources to maximize sparse-operator performance remains unclear. In this work, we first identify the source of performance gains in hybrid computation and systematically analyze their complementary strengths. Motivated by this, we propose Libra, a holistic framework that efficiently leverages heterogeneous computing resources to accelerate both SpMM and SDDMM operators. Specifically, Libra introduces a 2D-aware (locality and utilization) workload distribution method to precisely identify the optimal task mapping, simultaneously leveraging the data reuse capabilities of TCUs and the flexibility of CUDA cores to minimize computational redundancy. Libra further incorporates hybrid load balancing, occupancy-aware task scheduling, and efficient kernel implementations to maximize execution efficiency. Extensive experiments on H100 and RTX 4090 GPUs demonstrate that Libra surpasses all the 12 up-to-date baselines significantly, e.g., on average 1.77x speedup over FlashSparse, 1.73x over RoDe, and 2.9x over DGL for end-to-end GNN applications. Libra opens up a new perspective for sparse operator acceleration by fully unleashing the power of heterogeneous GPU resources.

cs.DC↗

arXiv2025

SparkAttention: High-Performance Multi-Head Attention for Large Models on Volta GPU Architecture

Transformer are widely used in various fields such as natural language processing and computer vision. However, the training time for large Transformer models can be challenging due to the Multi-Head Attention (MHA) mechanism. Especially as models become larger, training becomes more costly. So it is crucial to utilize various resources for efficient model training. Currently, NVIDIA Volta GPU is still widely used. However, because the computational shapes supported by Tensor Core Units (TCU) of Volta GPU differ from other GPU architectures, most efforts have not focused on using them to accelerate Transformer training. To address this issue, we propose SparkAttention, an acceleration library designed to speed up MHA training on the Volta GPU. SparkAttention leverages TCU and kernel fusion to reduce the number of high bandwidth memory (HBM) accesses and overhead. Our End-to-End experimental results on an NVIDIA V100 GPU show that SparkAttention achieves on average 1.80$\times$ (up to 2.46$\times$) speedup compared to using PyTorch.

cs.DC↗

arXiv2024

FlashSparse: Minimizing Computation Redundancy for Fast Sparse Matrix Multiplications on Tensor Cores

Sparse Matrix-matrix Multiplication (SpMM) and Sampled Dense-dense Matrix Multiplication (SDDMM) are important sparse operators in scientific computing and deep learning. Tensor Core Units (TCUs) enhance modern accelerators with superior computing power, which is promising to boost the performance of matrix operators to a higher level. However, due to the irregularity of unstructured sparse data, it is difficult to deliver practical speedups on TCUs. To this end, we propose FlashSparse, a novel approach to bridge the gap between sparse workloads and the TCU architecture. Specifically, FlashSparse minimizes the sparse granularity for SpMM and SDDMM on TCUs through a novel swap-and-transpose matrix multiplication strategy. Benefiting from the minimum sparse granularity, the computation redundancy is remarkably reduced while the computing power of TCUs is fully utilized. Besides, FlashSparse is equipped with a memory-efficient thread mapping strategy for coalesced data access and a sparse matrix storage format to save memory footprint. Extensive experimental results on H100 and RTX 4090 GPUs show that FlashSparse sets a new state-of-the-art for sparse matrix multiplications (geometric mean 5.5x speedup over DTC-SpMM and 3.22x speedup over RoDe).

cs.DC↗

arXiv2018

Fused Text Segmentation Networks for Multi-oriented Scene Text Detection

In this paper, we introduce a novel end-end framework for multi-oriented scene text detection from an instance-aware semantic segmentation perspective. We present Fused Text Segmentation Networks, which combine multi-level features during the feature extracting as text instance may rely on finer feature expression compared to general objects. It detects and segments the text instance jointly and simultaneously, leveraging merits from both semantic segmentation task and region proposal based object detection task. Not involving any extra pipelines, our approach surpasses the current state of the art on multi-oriented scene text detection benchmarks: ICDAR2015 Incidental Scene Text and MSRA-TD500 reaching Hmean 84.1% and 82.0% respectively. Morever, we report a baseline on total-text containing curved text which suggests effectiveness of the proposed approach.

cs.CV↗