Redundancy-Free High-Performance Dynamic GNN Training with Hierarchical Pipeline Parallelism
Yaqi Xia, Zheng Zhang, H. Wang, Donglin Yang, Xiaobo Zhou, Dazhao Cheng · 2023
Temporal Graph Neural Networks(TGNNs) extend the success of Graph Neural Networks to dynamic graphs. Distributed TGNN training requires efficiently tackling temporal dependency, which often leads to excessive cross-device communication that generates significant redundant data. However, existing systems are unable to remove the redundancy in data reuse and transfer, and suffer from severe communication overhead in a distributed setting. This paper presents Sven, an algorithm and system co-designed TGNN training library for the end-to-end performance optimization on multi-node multi-GPU systems. Exploiting dependency patterns of TGNN models and characteristics of dynamic graph datasets, we design redundancy-free data organization and load-balancing partitioning strategies that mitigate the redundant data communication and evenly partition dynamic graphs at the vertex level. Furthermore, we develop a hierarchical pipeline mechanism integrating data prefetching, micro-batch pipelining, and asynchronous pipelining to mitigate the communication overhead. As the first scaling study on the memory-based TGNNs training, experiments conducted on an HPC cluster of 64 GPUs show that Sven can achieve up to 1.7x-3.3x speedup over the state-of-art approaches and a factor of up to 5.26x communication efficiency improvement.