LOw-cOst yet High-Performant Sparse Matrix-Matrix Multiplication on Arm SME Architectures

Abstract: Sparse matrix-dense matrix multiplication (SpMM) is a critical kernel in both scientific computing and emerging graph learning workloads. The recent Armv9 architecture introduces Scalable Matrix Extension (SME), enabling tile-based matrix operations with high throughput. However, effectively exploiting both SME and traditional SIMD resources for unstructured sparse workloads remains an open challenge. To address this, we propose LOOPS, a hybrid execution framework that combines row-wise CSR-part with vector-wise BCSR-part layout, enabling cooperative utilization of vector instructions (NEON) and Scalable Matrix Extension (SME) resources. LOOPS supports multi-precision SpMM across FP64, FP32, and FP16 via an adaptive two-level parallelization scheme guided by a lightweight performance model. Experimental results on the entire SuiteSparse on an Apple's M4Pro CPU show that LOOPS achieves average speedups of 9.93$\times$ (FP32)/14.4$\times$ (FP64) against the CPU baseline TACO and 71.3$\times$ (FP32)/54.8$\times$ (FP64) with respect to Armadillo. A comparison of LOOPS running on the same CPU with two GPU methods (cuSPARSE, Magicube) executed on an NVIDIA A100 GPU show average speedups for LOOPS between 19.8$\times$ and 33.5$\times$, depending on the precision. Notably, LOOPS delivers significantly better energy efficiency than the GPU codes on the A100 GPU.