Comprehensive Evaluation of GNN Training Systems: A Data Management Perspective

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.

NeutronOrch: Rethinking Sample-based GNN Training under CPU-GPU Heterogeneous Environments

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 4.61x performance speedup.

DeepOHeat: Operator Learning-based Ultra-fast Thermal Simulation in 3D-IC Design

Thermal issue is a major concern in 3D integrated circuit (IC) design. Thermal optimization of 3D IC often requires massive expensive PDE simulations. Neural network-based thermal prediction models can perform real-time prediction for many unseen new designs. However, existing works either solve 2D temperature fields only or do not generalize well to new designs with unseen design configurations (e.g., heat sources and boundary conditions). In this paper, for the first time, we propose DeepOHeat, a physics-aware operator learning framework to predict the temperature field of a family of heat equations with multiple parametric or non-parametric design configurations. This framework learns a functional map from the function space of multiple key PDE configurations (e.g., boundary conditions, power maps, heat transfer coefficients) to the function space of the corresponding solution (i.e., temperature fields), enabling fast thermal analysis and optimization by changing key design configurations (rather than just some parameters). We test DeepOHeat on some industrial design cases and compare it against Celsius 3D from Cadence Design Systems. Our results show that, for the unseen testing cases, a well-trained DeepOHeat can produce accurate results with $1000\times$ to $300000\times$ speedup.