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Vertex-Centric Visual Programming for Graph Neural Networks

Published: 18 June 2021 Publication History

Abstract

Graph neural networks (GNNs) have achieved remarkable performance in many graph analytics tasks such as node classification, link prediction and graph clustering. Existing GNN systems (e.g., PyG and DGL) adopt a tensor-centric programming model and train GNNs with manually written operators. Such design results in poor usability due to the large semantic gap between the API and the GNN models, and suffers from inferior efficiency because of high memory consumption and massive data movement. We demonstrateSeastar, a novel GNN training framework that adopts avertex-centric programming paradigm and supportsautomatic kernel generation, to simplify model development and improve training efficiency. We will (i) show how to express GNN models succinctly using a visual "drag-and-drop'' interface or Seastar's vertex-centric python API; (ii) demonstrate the performance advantage of Seastar over existing GNN systems in convergence speed, training throughput and memory consumption; and (iii) illustrate how Seastar's optimizations (e.g., operator fusion and constant folding) improve training efficiency by profiling the run-time performance.

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Graph neural networks (GNNs) have achieved remarkable performance in many graph analytics tasks such as node classification, link prediction and graph clustering. Existing GNN systems (e.g., PyG and DGL) adopt a tensor-centric programming model and train GNNs with manually written operators. Such design results in poor usability due to the large semantic gap between the API and the GNN models, and suffers from inferior efficiency because of high memory consumption and massive data movement. We demonstrate Seastar, a novel GNN training framework that adopts a vertex-centric programming paradigm and supports automatic kernel generation, to simplify model development and improve training efficiency. We will (i) show how to express GNN models succinctly using a visual ``drag-and-drop'' interface or Seastar's vertex-centric python API;(ii) demonstrate the performance advantage of Seastar over existing GNN systems in convergence speed, training throughput and memory consumption; and (iii) illustrate how Seastar's optimizations (e.g., operator fusion and constant folding) improve training efficiency by profiling the run-time performance.

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  • (2022)ByteGNNProceedings of the VLDB Endowment10.14778/3514061.351406915:6(1228-1242)Online publication date: 1-Feb-2022
  • (2022)Motif Prediction with Graph Neural NetworksProceedings of the 28th ACM SIGKDD Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining10.1145/3534678.3539343(35-45)Online publication date: 14-Aug-2022
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cover image ACM Conferences
SIGMOD '21: Proceedings of the 2021 International Conference on Management of Data
June 2021
2969 pages
ISBN:9781450383431
DOI:10.1145/3448016
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Published: 18 June 2021

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  1. deep learning system
  2. graph neural network

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Cited By

View all
  • (2023)IMinimize: A System for Negative Influence Minimization via Vertex BlockingProceedings of the 32nd ACM International Conference on Information and Knowledge Management10.1145/3583780.3614743(5101-5105)Online publication date: 21-Oct-2023
  • (2022)ByteGNNProceedings of the VLDB Endowment10.14778/3514061.351406915:6(1228-1242)Online publication date: 1-Feb-2022
  • (2022)Motif Prediction with Graph Neural NetworksProceedings of the 28th ACM SIGKDD Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining10.1145/3534678.3539343(35-45)Online publication date: 14-Aug-2022
  • (2022)HGL: Accelerating Heterogeneous GNN Training with Holistic Representation and OptimizationSC22: International Conference for High Performance Computing, Networking, Storage and Analysis10.1109/SC41404.2022.00077(1-15)Online publication date: Nov-2022

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