Saima Afrin

Yidong Gong, Saima Afrin, Yuchen Ma et al.

Modern deep learning workloads increasingly exhibit dynamic, metadata-driven execution, where runtime-generated information determines memory provisioning and kernel launch decisions. In sampling-based graph neural network (GNN) training, this behavior places the CPU on the critical path, introducing persistent host-device orchestration overhead and frequent GPU-CPU synchronization, which dominate end-to-end runtime when GPU computation is small. Existing approaches, including CUDA Graphs and GPU dynamic parallelism, fail to address this problem because the metadata-driven control loop remains host-mediated, and execution structure varies across iterations. We present ZEROGNN, a system that removes the host from the metadata-driven control loop and enables fully GPU-resident execution under dynamic behavior. ZEROGNN keeps runtime metadata on-device, mediates dynamic execution within a fixed launch structure, and provisions a conservative yet tight execution envelope to restore CUDA Graph replayability. Experiments on sampling-based GNN workloads show that ZEROGNN achieves up to 5.28 x end-to-end speedup, near 100% GPU execution fraction, and memory efficiency comparable to ideal metadata-informed allocation, while enabling strong multi-GPU scaling by eliminating host-side bottlenecks.

Yidong Gong, Arnab Tarafder, Saima Afrin et al.

The current graph neural network (GNN) systems have established a clear trend of not showing training accuracy results, and directly or indirectly relying on smaller datasets for evaluations majorly. Our in-depth analysis shows that it leads to a chain of pitfalls in the system design and evaluation process, questioning the practicality of many of the proposed system optimizations, and affecting conclusions and lessons learned. We analyze many single-GPU systems and show the fundamental impact of these pitfalls. We further develop hypotheses, recommendations, and evaluation methodologies, and provide future directions. Finally, a new reference system is developed to establish a new line of optimizations rooted in solving the system-design pitfalls efficiently and practically. The proposed design can productively be integrated into prior works, thereby truly advancing the state-of-the-art.