  We implement two novel algorithms for sparse-matrix dense-matrix
multiplication (SpMM) on the GPU. Our algorithms expect the sparse input in the
popular compressed-sparse-row (CSR) format and thus do not require expensive
format conversion. While previous SpMM work concentrates on thread-level
parallelism, we additionally focus on latency hiding with instruction-level
parallelism and load-balancing. We show, both theoretically and experimentally,
that the proposed SpMM is a better fit for the GPU than previous approaches. We
identify a key memory access pattern that allows efficient access into both
input and output matrices that is crucial to getting excellent performance on
SpMM. By combining these two ingredients---(i) merge-based load-balancing and
(ii) row-major coalesced memory access---we demonstrate a 4.1x peak speedup and
a 31.7% geomean speedup over state-of-the-art SpMM implementations on
real-world datasets.
