GPU Accelerated SVM with Sparse Sliced EllR-T Matrix Format

Abstract

This paper presents the SECu-SVM algorithm for solving classification problems. It allows for a significant acceleration of the standard SVM implementations by transferring the most time-consuming computations from the standard CPU to the Graphics Processor Units (GPU). In addition, highly efficient Sliced EllR-T sparse matrix format was used for storing the dataset in GPU memory, which requires a very low memory footprint and is also well adapted to parallel processing. Performed experiments demonstrate an acceleration of 4–100 times over LibSVM. Moreover, in the majority of cases the SECu-SVM is less time-consuming than the best sparse GPU implementations and allows for handling significantly larger classification datasets.