Yanfeng Zhang

Weixing Zhou, Qi Peng, Zijie Zhang et al.

Multinational enterprises conduct global business that has a demand for geo-distributed transactional databases. Existing state-of-the-art databases adopt a sharded master-follower replication architecture. However, the single-master serving mode incurs massive cross-region writes from clients, and the sharded architecture requires multiple round-trip acknowledgments (e.g., 2PC) to ensure atomicity for cross-shard transactions. These limitations drive us to seek yet another design choice. In this paper, we propose a strongly consistent OLTP database GeoGauss with full replica multi-master architecture. To efficiently merge the updates from different master nodes, we propose a multi-master OCC that unifies data replication and concurrent transaction processing. By leveraging an epoch-based delta state merge rule and the optimistic asynchronous execution, GeoGauss ensures strong consistency with light-coordinated protocol and allows more concurrency with weak isolation, which are sufficient to meet our needs. Our geo-distributed experimental results show that GeoGauss achieves 7.06X higher throughput and 17.41X lower latency than the state-of-the-art geo-distributed database CockroachDB on the TPC-C benchmark.

Hao Yuan, Yajiong Liu, Yanfeng Zhang et al.

Many Graph Neural Network (GNN) training systems have emerged recently to support efficient GNN training. Since GNNs embody complex data dependencies between training samples, the training of GNNs should address distinct challenges different from DNN training in data management, such as data partitioning, batch preparation for mini-batch training, and data transferring between CPUs and GPUs. These factors, which take up a large proportion of training time, make data management in GNN training more significant. This paper reviews GNN training from a data management perspective and provides a comprehensive analysis and evaluation of the representative approaches. We conduct extensive experiments on various benchmark datasets and show many interesting and valuable results. We also provide some practical tips learned from these experiments, which are helpful for designing GNN training systems in the future.

Xin Ai, Qiange Wang, Chunyu Cao et al.

Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have demonstrated outstanding performance in various applications. Existing frameworks utilize CPU-GPU heterogeneous environments to train GNN models and integrate mini-batch and sampling techniques to overcome the GPU memory limitation. In CPU-GPU heterogeneous environments, we can divide sample-based GNN training into three steps: sample, gather, and train. Existing GNN systems use different task orchestrating methods to employ each step on CPU or GPU. After extensive experiments and analysis, we find that existing task orchestrating methods fail to fully utilize the heterogeneous resources, limited by inefficient CPU processing or GPU resource contention. In this paper, we propose NeutronOrch, a system for sample-based GNN training that incorporates a layer-based task orchestrating method and ensures balanced utilization of the CPU and GPU. NeutronOrch decouples the training process by layer and pushes down the training task of the bottom layer to the CPU. This significantly reduces the computational load and memory footprint of GPU training. To avoid inefficient CPU processing, NeutronOrch only offloads the training of frequently accessed vertices to the CPU and lets GPU reuse their embeddings with bounded staleness. Furthermore, NeutronOrch provides a fine-grained pipeline design for the layer-based task orchestrating method, fully overlapping different tasks on heterogeneous resources while strictly guaranteeing bounded staleness. The experimental results show that compared with the state-of-the-art GNN systems, NeutronOrch can achieve up to 11.51x performance speedup.

Chaoyi Chen, Dechao Gao, Yanfeng Zhang et al.

Existing Graph Neural Network (GNN) training frameworks have been designed to help developers easily create performant GNN implementations. However, most existing GNN frameworks assume that the input graphs are static, but ignore that most real-world graphs are constantly evolving. Though many dynamic GNN models have emerged to learn from evolving graphs, the training process of these dynamic GNNs is dramatically different from traditional GNNs in that it captures both the spatial and temporal dependencies of graph updates. This poses new challenges for designing dynamic GNN training frameworks. First, the traditional batched training method fails to capture real-time structural evolution information. Second, the time-dependent nature makes parallel training hard to design. Third, it lacks system supports for users to efficiently implement dynamic GNNs. In this paper, we present NeutronStream, a framework for training dynamic GNN models. NeutronStream abstracts the input dynamic graph into a chronologically updated stream of events and processes the stream with an optimized sliding window to incrementally capture the spatial-temporal dependencies of events. Furthermore, NeutronStream provides a parallel execution engine to tackle the sequential event processing challenge to achieve high performance. NeutronStream also integrates a built-in graph storage structure that supports dynamic updates and provides a set of easy-to-use APIs that allow users to express their dynamic GNNs. Our experimental results demonstrate that, compared to state-of-the-art dynamic GNN implementations, NeutronStream achieves speedups ranging from 1.48X to 5.87X and an average accuracy improvement of 3.97%.

Yanyan Liang, Yanfeng Zhang, Dechao Gao et al.

How to utilize deep learning methods for graph classification tasks has attracted considerable research attention in the past few years. Regarding graph classification tasks, the graphs to be classified may have various graph sizes (i.e., different number of nodes and edges) and have various graph properties (e.g., average node degree, diameter, and clustering coefficient). The diverse property of graphs has imposed significant challenges on existing graph learning techniques since diverse graphs have different best-fit hyperparameters. It is difficult to learn graph features from a set of diverse graphs by a unified graph neural network. This motivates us to use a multiplex structure in a diverse way and utilize a priori properties of graphs to guide the learning. In this paper, we propose MxPool, which concurrently uses multiple graph convolution/pooling networks to build a hierarchical learning structure for graph representation learning tasks. Our experiments on numerous graph classification benchmarks show that our MxPool has superiority over other state-of-the-art graph representation learning methods.

Yabing Zhu, Yanfeng Zhang, Huili Yang et al.

We propose GANCoder, an automatic programming approach based on Generative Adversarial Networks (GAN), which can generate the same functional and logical programming language codes conditioned on the given natural language utterances. The adversarial training between generator and discriminator helps generator learn distribution of dataset and improve code generation quality. Our experimental results show that GANCoder can achieve comparable accuracy with the state-of-the-art methods and is more stable when programming languages.

Shufeng Gong, Yanfeng Zhang, Ge Yu

Stream clustering is a fundamental problem in many streaming data analysis applications. Comparing to classical batch-mode clustering, there are two key challenges in stream clustering: (i) Given that input data are changing continuously, how to incrementally update clustering results efficiently? (ii) Given that clusters continuously evolve with the evolution of data, how to capture the cluster evolution activities? Unfortunately, most of existing stream clustering algorithms can neither update the cluster result in real time nor track the evolution of clusters. In this paper, we propose an stream clustering algorithm EDMStream by exploring the Evolution of Density Mountain. The density mountain is used to abstract the data distribution, the changes of which indicate data distribution evolution. We track the evolution of clusters by monitoring the changes of density mountains. We further provide efficient data structures and filtering schemes to ensure the update of density mountains in real time, which makes online clustering possible. The experimental results on synthetic and real datasets show that, comparing to the state-of-the-art stream clustering algorithms, e.g., D-Stream, DenStream, DBSTREAM and MR-Stream, our algorithm can response to a cluster update much faster (say 7-15x faster than the best of the competitors) and at the same time achieve comparable cluster quality. Furthermore, EDMStream can successfully capture the cluster evolution activities.