%APranathi Vasireddy, Krishna%D2022%I %K %MOSTI ID: 10347473 %PMedium: X %THardware accelerator thread for unstructured sparse data processing %XSparse matrix-dense vector (SpMV) multiplication is inherent in most scientific, neural networks and machine learning algorithms. To efficiently exploit sparsity of data in the SpMV computations, several compressed data representations have been used. However, the compressed data representations of sparse date can result in overheads for locating nonzero values, requiring indirect memory accesses and increased instruction count and memory access delays. We call these translations of compressed representations as metadata processing. We propose a memory-side accelerator for metadata (or indexing) computations and supplying only the required nonzero values to the processor, additionally permitting an overlap of indexing with core computations on nonzero elements. In this contribution, we target our accelerator for low-end microcontrollers with very limited memory and processing capabilities. In this paper we will explore two dedicated ASIC designs of the proposed accelerator that handles the indexed memory accesses for compressed sparse row (CSR) format working alongside a simple RISC-like programmable core. One version of the the accelerator supplies only vector values corresponding to nonzero matrix values and the second version supplies both nonzero matrix and matching vector values for SpMV computations. Our experiments show speedups ranging between 1.3 and 2.1 times for SpMV for different levels of sparsities. Our accelerator also results in energy savings ranging between 15.8% and 52.7% over different matrix sizes, when compared to the baseline system with primary RISC-V core performing all computations. We use smaller synthetic matrices with different sparsities and larger real-world matrices with higher sparsities (below 1% non-zeros) in our experimental evaluations. Country unknown/Code not availableOSTI-MSA