Efficient In-Memory Acceleration of Sparse Block Diagonal LLMs
Research output: Contribution to book/Conference proceedings/Anthology/Report › Conference contribution › Contributed › peer-review
Contributors
- Transregio 404: Next Generation Electronics With Active Devices in Three Dimensions
Abstract
Structured sparsity enables deploying large language models (LLMs) on resource-constrained systems. Approaches like dense-to-sparse fine-tuning are particularly compelling, achieving remarkable structured sparsity by reducing the model size by over 6.7×, while still maintaining acceptable accuracy. Despite this reduction, LLM inference, especially the decode stage being inherently memory-bound, is extremely expensive on conventional Von-Neumann architectures. Compute-in-memory (CIM) architectures mitigate this by performing computations directly in memory, and when paired with sparse LLMs, enable storing and computing the entire model in memory - eliminating the data movement on the off-chip bus and improving efficiency. Nonetheless, naively mapping sparse matrices onto CIM arrays leads to poor array utilization and diminished computational efficiency. In this paper, we present an automated framework with novel mapping and scheduling strategies to accelerate sparse LLM inference on CIM accelerators. By exploiting block-diagonal sparsity, our approach improves CIM array utilization by over 50%, achieving more than 4× reduction in both memory footprint and the number of required floating-point operations.
Details
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Title of host publication | 2025 Cross-Disciplinary Conference on Memory-Centric Computing, CCMCC 2025 |
| Publisher | Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) |
| ISBN (electronic) | 979-8-3315-7459-8 |
| ISBN (print) | 979-8-3315-7460-4 |
| Publication status | E-pub ahead of print - Oct 2025 |
| Peer-reviewed | Yes |
Conference
| Title | 2025 Cross-Disciplinary Conference on Memory-Centric Computing |
|---|---|
| Abbreviated title | CCMCC 2025 |
| Duration | 8 - 10 October 2025 |
| Location | Dorint Hotel Dresden |
| City | Dresden |
| Country | Germany |
External IDs
| ORCID | /0000-0002-5007-445X/work/217234236 |
|---|---|
| ORCID | /0000-0001-9295-3519/work/217239134 |
Keywords
Research priority areas of TU Dresden
ASJC Scopus subject areas
Keywords
- Computing-in-memory, Large language models, Structured sparsity