Electronics, Vol. 12, Pages 1599: A Preliminary Empirical Study of the Power Efficiency of Matrix Multiplication

Electronics, Vol. 12, Pages 1599: A Preliminary Empirical Study of the Power Efficiency of Matrix Multiplication

Electronics doi: 10.3390/electronics12071599

Authors: Fares Jammal Naif Aljabri Muhammad Al-Hashimi Mostafa Saleh Osama Abulnaja

Matrix multiplication is ubiquitous in high-performance applications. It will be a significant part of exascale workloads where power is a big concern. This work experimentally studied the power efficiency of three matrix multiplication algorithms: the definition-based, Strassen’s divide-and-conquer, and an optimized divide-and-conquer. The study used reliable on-chip integrated voltage regulators for measuring the power. Interactions with memory, mainly cache misses, were thoroughly investigated. The main result was that the optimized divide-and-conquer algorithm, which is the most time-efficient, was also the most power-efficient, but only for cases that fit in the cache. It consumed drastically less overall energy than the other two methods, regardless of placement in memory. For matrix sizes that caused a spill to the main memory, the definition-based algorithm consumes less power than the divide-and-conquer ones at a high total energy cost. The findings from this study may be of interest when cutting power usage is more vital than running for the shortest possible time or least amount of energy.