A systolic accelerator for the iterative solution of sparse linear systems

Abstract

The idea of grouping the nonzero elements of a sparse matrix into a few stripes that are almost parallel is applied to the design of a systolic accelerator for sparse matrix operations. This accelerator is then integrated into a complete systolic system for the solution of large sparse linear systems of equations. The design demonstrates that the application of systolic arrays is not limited to regular computations, and that computationally irregular problems can be solved on systolic networks if local storage is provided in each systolic cell for buffering the irregularity in the data movement and for absorbing the irregularity in the computation. >