TeAAL: A Declarative Framework for Modeling Sparse Tensor Accelerators

Abstract

Over the past few years, the explosion in sparse tensor algebra workloads has led to a corresponding rise in domain-specific accelerators to service them. Due to the irregularity present in sparse tensors, these accelerators employ a wide variety of novel solutions to achieve good performance. At the same time, prior work on design-flexible sparse accelerator modeling does not express this full range of design features, making it difficult to understand the impact of each design choice and compare or extend the state-of-the-art. To address this, we propose TeAAL: a language and simulator generator for the concise and precise specification and evaluation of sparse tensor algebra accelerators. We use TeAAL to represent and evaluate four disparate state-of-the-art accelerators -- ExTensor, Gamma, OuterSPACE, and SIGMA -- and verify that it reproduces their performance with high accuracy. Finally, we demonstrate the potential of TeAAL as a tool for designing new accelerators by showing how it can be used to speed up vertex-centric programming accelerators -- achieving $1.9\times$ on BFS and $1.2\times$ on SSSP over GraphDynS.