Matrix Multiplication in Multiword Arithmetic: Error Analysis and Application to GPU Tensor Cores

Fasi, Massimiliano; Higham, Nicholas J.; Lopez, Florent; Mary, Theo; Mikaitis, Mantas

Abstract

In multiword arithmetic, a matrix is represented as the unevaluated sum of two or more lower precision matrices, and a matrix product is formed by multiplying the constituents in low precision. We investigate the use of multiword arithmetic for improving the performance-accuracy tradeoff of matrix multiplication with mixed precision block fused multiply–add (FMA) hardware, focusing especially on the tensor cores available on NVIDIA GPUs. Building on a general block FMA framework, we develop a comprehensive error analysis of multiword matrix multiplication. After confirming the theoretical error bounds experimentally by simulating low precision in software, we use the cuBLAS and CUTLASS libraries to implement a number of matrix multiplication algorithms using double-fp16 (double-binary16) arithmetic. When running the algorithms on NVIDIA V100 and A100 GPUs, we find that double-fp16 is not as accurate as fp32 (binary32) arithmetic despite satisfying the same worst-case error bound. Using probabilistic error analysis, we explain why this issue is likely to be caused by the rounding mode used by the NVIDIA tensor cores, and we propose a parameterized blocked summation algorithm that alleviates the problem and significantly improves the performance-accuracy tradeoff.

Citation

Fasi, M., Higham, N. J., Lopez, F., Mary, T., & Mikaitis, M. (2023). Matrix Multiplication in Multiword Arithmetic: Error Analysis and Application to GPU Tensor Cores. SIAM Journal on Scientific Computing, 45(1), https://doi.org/10.1137/21M1465032

• Journal Article Type: Article
• Acceptance Date: Aug 24, 2022
• Online Publication Date: Feb 2, 2023
• Publication Date: Feb 2, 2023
• Deposit Date: Oct 14, 2022
• Journal: SIAM Journal on Scientific Computing
• Print ISSN: 1064-8275
• Electronic ISSN: 1095-7197
• Publisher: Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics
• Volume: 45
• Issue: 1
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1137/21M1465032
• Public URL: https://durham-repository.worktribe.com/output/1188984
• Related Public URLs: http://eprints.maths.manchester.ac.uk/2862/