Network pruning can reduce the high computation cost of deep neural network (DNN) models. However, to maintain their accuracies, sparse models often carry randomly-distributed weights, leading to irregular computations. Consequently, sparse models cannot achieve meaningful speedup on commodity hardware (e.g., GPU) built for dense matrix computations. As such, prior works usually modify or design completely new sparsity-optimized architectures for exploiting sparsity. We propose an algorithm-software co-designed pruning method that achieves latency speedups on existing dense architectures. Our work builds upon the insight that the matrix multiplication generally breaks the large matrix into multiple smaller tiles for parallel execution. We propose a tiling-friendly "tile-wise" sparsity pattern, which maintains a regular pattern at the tile level for efficient execution but allows for irregular, arbitrary pruning at the global scale to maintain the high accuracy. We implement and evaluate the sparsity pattern on GPU tensor core, achieving a 1.95x speedup over the dense model.

本文提出了一种算法-软件共同设计的剪枝方法，采用“分块友好”的稀疏模式来实现现有的密集结构上的延迟加速，旨在解决原先稀疏模型上由于随机分布权重导致计算不规则的问题，在GPU笔记本上成功地实现了1.95倍速度提升的优化效果。

通过划分稀疏矩阵块提高无硬件支持的稀疏DNN模型加速