  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.

Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing;Artificial Intelligence