Muhammed Fati̇h Balin

Muhammed Fatih Balın, Ümit V. Çatalyürek · gatech

Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have received significant attention recently, but training them at a large scale remains a challenge. Mini-batch training coupled with sampling is used to alleviate this challenge. However, existing approaches either suffer from the neighborhood explosion phenomenon or have poor performance. To address these issues, we propose a new sampling algorithm called LAyer-neighBOR sampling (LABOR). It is designed to be a direct replacement for Neighbor Sampling (NS) with the same fanout hyperparameter while sampling up to 7 times fewer vertices, without sacrificing quality. By design, the variance of the estimator of each vertex matches NS from the point of view of a single vertex. Moreover, under the same vertex sampling budget constraints, LABOR converges faster than existing layer sampling approaches and can use up to 112 times larger batch sizes compared to NS.

Muhammed Fatih Balin, Dominique LaSalle, Ümit V. Çatalyürek

Training large scale Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) requires significant computational resources, and the process is highly data-intensive. One of the most effective ways to reduce resource requirements is minibatch training coupled with graph sampling. GNNs have the unique property that items in a minibatch have overlapping data. However, the commonly implemented Independent Minibatching approach assigns each Processing Element (PE, i.e., cores and/or GPUs) its own minibatch to process, leading to duplicated computations and input data access across PEs. This amplifies the Neighborhood Explosion Phenomenon (NEP), which is the main bottleneck limiting scaling. To reduce the effects of NEP in the multi-PE setting, we propose a new approach called Cooperative Minibatching. Our approach capitalizes on the fact that the size of the sampled subgraph is a concave function of the batch size, leading to significant reductions in the amount of work as batch sizes increase. Hence, it is favorable for processors equipped with a fast interconnect to work on a large minibatch together as a single larger processor, instead of working on separate smaller minibatches, even though global batch size is identical. We also show how to take advantage of the same phenomenon in serial execution by generating dependent consecutive minibatches. Our experimental evaluations show up to 4x bandwidth savings for fetching vertex embeddings, by simply increasing this dependency without harming model convergence. Combining our proposed approaches, we achieve up to 64% speedup over Independent Minibatching on single-node multi-GPU systems, using same resources.

Omar Alsaqa, Linh Thi Hoang, Muhammed Fatih Balin

Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) are powerful tools for learning from graph-structured data, but their application to large graphs is hindered by computational costs. The need to process every neighbor for each node creates memory and computational bottlenecks. To address this, we introduce BLISS, a Bandit Layer Importance Sampling Strategy. It uses multi-armed bandits to dynamically select the most informative nodes at each layer, balancing exploration and exploitation to ensure comprehensive graph coverage. Unlike existing static sampling methods, BLISS adapts to evolving node importance, leading to more informed node selection and improved performance. It demonstrates versatility by integrating with both Graph Convolutional Networks (GCNs) and Graph Attention Networks (GATs), adapting its selection policy to their specific aggregation mechanisms. Experiments show that BLISS maintains or exceeds the accuracy of full-batch training.

Kaan Sancak, Zhigang Hua, Jin Fang et al.

Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have shown impressive performance in graph representation learning, but they face challenges in capturing long-range dependencies due to their limited expressive power. To address this, Graph Transformers (GTs) were introduced, utilizing self-attention mechanism to effectively model pairwise node relationships. Despite their advantages, GTs suffer from quadratic complexity w.r.t. the number of nodes in the graph, hindering their applicability to large graphs. In this work, we present Graph-Enhanced Contextual Operator (GECO), a scalable and effective alternative to GTs that leverages neighborhood propagation and global convolutions to effectively capture local and global dependencies in quasilinear time. Our study on synthetic datasets reveals that GECO reaches 169x speedup on a graph with 2M nodes w.r.t. optimized attention. Further evaluations on diverse range of benchmarks showcase that GECO scales to large graphs where traditional GTs often face memory and time limitations. Notably, GECO consistently achieves comparable or superior quality compared to baselines, improving the SOTA up to 4.5%, and offering a scalable and effective solution for large-scale graph learning.

Muhammed Fatih Balın, Kaan Sancak, Ümit V. Çatalyürek

Full batch training of Graph Convolutional Network (GCN) models is not feasible on a single GPU for large graphs containing tens of millions of vertices or more. Recent work has shown that, for the graphs used in the machine learning community, communication becomes a bottleneck and scaling is blocked outside of the single machine regime. Thus, we propose MG-GCN, a multi-GPU GCN training framework taking advantage of the high-speed communication links between the GPUs present in multi-GPU systems. MG-GCN employs multiple High-Performance Computing optimizations, including efficient re-use of memory buffers to reduce the memory footprint of training GNN models, as well as communication and computation overlap. These optimizations enable execution on larger datasets, that generally do not fit into memory of a single GPU in state-of-the-art implementations. Furthermore, they contribute to achieve superior speedup compared to the state-of-the-art. For example, MG-GCN achieves super-linear speedup with respect to DGL, on the Reddit graph on both DGX-1 (V100) and DGX-A100.