Steven J. Barnett

BIN-CSR is a sparse, symmetric matrix format, originally described by Daniel Weber et. al in their 2012 paper on GPU data structures. BIN-CSR is suitable for applications which use massively parallelized matrix operations, like some GPU-based finite element method solvers.

The diagonal elements of the matrix are stored separately, to enable fast preconditioning of the matrix. Preconditioning is a step which allows for faster convergence when performing a system solving method like the conjugate gradient method.

The WebGL demos on this page aim to demonstrate the construction of a BIN-CSR matrix in an interactive way.

The following is a dramatically over-engineered representation of our original matrix. Drag the slider to change the dimensions of the matrix.

The elements of this matrix are packed into padded bins. Each bin contains a set number of rows worth of data. The number of rows contained in a bin is called the bin width. The following is an illustration of bin data packing. The slider can be used to adjust the bin width.

The above visual shows the theoretical grouping of the data. The actual layout of the data in memory is optimized for coallesced memory access on the GPU. In actuality, the data is stored in four separate arrays, visualized here:

The values in the pointer array (gray) are indices into the value and column arrays (black), indicating the starting index for each row. The pointer values are represented by gray connecting lines.