{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/the-sparse-abstract-machine","title":"The Sparse Abstract Machine","arxiv_id":"2208.14610","date":"2022-08-31","proceeding":null,"authors":["Olivia Hsu","Maxwell Strange","Ritvik Sharma","Jaeyeon Won","Kunle Olukotun","Joel Emer","Mark Horowitz","Fredrik Kjolstad"],"abstract":"We propose the Sparse Abstract Machine (SAM), an abstract machine model for targeting sparse tensor algebra to reconfigurable and fixed-function spatial dataflow accelerators. SAM defines a streaming dataflow abstraction with sparse primitives that encompass a large space of scheduled tensor algebra expressions. SAM dataflow graphs naturally separate tensor formats from algorithms and are expressive enough to incorporate arbitrary iteration orderings and many hardware-specific optimizations. We also present Custard, a compiler from a high-level language to SAM that demonstrates SAM's usefulness as an intermediate representation. We automatically bind from SAM to a streaming dataflow simulator. We evaluate the generality and extensibility of SAM, explore the performance space of sparse tensor algebra optimizations using SAM, and show SAM's ability to represent dataflow hardware.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2208.14610v2","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2208.14610v2.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"links_only","authors_date_abstract":"arXiv metadata, CC0 1.0 (https://info.arxiv.org/help/license), from the Kaggle arXiv metadata snapshot of 2026-09-12"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"the-sparse-abstract-machine","repo_url":"https://github.com/weiya711/sam","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":0,"framework":"none","reach":null}],"tasks":[],"methods":[],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"atlas_url":null,"mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}