arXiv subjects

Nikolai Merkel

Publications and source records attributed to Nikolai Merkel.

4 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

EmbedPart: Embedding-Driven Graph Partitioning for Scalable Graph Neural Network Training

Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) are widely used for learning on graph-structured data, but scaling GNN training to massive graphs remains challenging. To enable scalable distributed training, graphs are divided into smaller partitions that are distributed across multiple machines such that inter-machine communication is minimized and computational load is balanced. In practice, existing partitioning approaches face a fundamental trade-off between partitioning overhead and partitioning quality. We propose EmbedPart, an embedding-driven partitioning approach that achieves both speed and quality. Instead of operating directly on irregular graph structures, EmbedPart leverages node embeddings produced during the actual GNN training workload and clusters these dense embeddings to derive a partitioning. EmbedPart achieves more than 100x speedup over Metis while maintaining competitive partitioning quality and accelerating distributed GNN training. Moreover, EmbedPart naturally supports graph updates and fast repartitioning, and can be applied to graph reordering to improve data locality and accelerate single-machine GNN training. By shifting partitioning from irregular graph structures to dense embeddings, EmbedPart enables scalable and high-quality graph data optimization.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2024

Can Graph Reordering Speed Up Graph Neural Network Training? An Experimental Study

Graph neural networks (GNNs) are a type of neural network capable of learning on graph-structured data. However, training GNNs on large-scale graphs is challenging due to iterative aggregations of high-dimensional features from neighboring vertices within sparse graph structures combined with neural network operations. The sparsity of graphs frequently results in suboptimal memory access patterns and longer training time. Graph reordering is an optimization strategy aiming to improve the graph data layout. It has shown to be effective to speed up graph analytics workloads, but its effect on the performance of GNN training has not been investigated yet. The generalization of reordering to GNN performance is nontrivial, as multiple aspects must be considered: GNN hyper-parameters such as the number of layers, the number of hidden dimensions, and the feature size used in the GNN model, neural network operations, large intermediate vertex states, and GPU acceleration. In our work, we close this gap by performing an empirical evaluation of 12 reordering strategies in two state-of-the-art GNN systems, PyTorch Geometric and Deep Graph Library. Our results show that graph reordering is effective in reducing training time for CPU- and GPU-based training, respectively. Further, we find that GNN hyper-parameters influence the effectiveness of reordering, that reordering metrics play an important role in selecting a reordering strategy, that lightweight reordering performs better for GPU-based than for CPU-based training, and that invested reordering time can in many cases be amortized.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2023

An Experimental Comparison of Partitioning Strategies for Distributed Graph Neural Network Training

Recently, graph neural networks (GNNs) have gained much attention as a growing area of deep learning capable of learning on graph-structured data. However, the computational and memory requirements for training GNNs on large-scale graphs make it necessary to distribute the training. A prerequisite for distributed GNN training is to partition the input graph into smaller parts that are distributed among multiple machines of a compute cluster. Although graph partitioning has been studied with regard to graph analytics and graph databases, its effect on GNN training performance is largely unexplored. As a consequence, it is unclear whether investing computational efforts into high-quality graph partitioning would pay off in GNN training scenarios. In this paper, we study the effectiveness of graph partitioning for distributed GNN training. Our study aims to understand how different factors such as GNN parameters, mini-batch size, graph type, features size, and scale-out factor influence the effectiveness of graph partitioning. We conduct experiments with two different GNN systems using vertex and edge partitioning. We found that high-quality graph partitioning is a very effective optimization to speed up GNN training and to reduce memory consumption. Furthermore, our results show that invested partitioning time can quickly be amortized by reduced GNN training time, making it a relevant optimization for most GNN scenarios. Compared to research on distributed graph processing, our study reveals that graph partitioning plays an even more significant role in distributed GNN training, which motivates further research on the graph partitioning problem.

cs.DC↗

arXiv2023

Partitioner Selection with EASE to Optimize Distributed Graph Processing

For distributed graph processing on massive graphs, a graph is partitioned into multiple equally-sized parts which are distributed among machines in a compute cluster. In the last decade, many partitioning algorithms have been developed which differ from each other with respect to the partitioning quality, the run-time of the partitioning and the type of graph for which they work best. The plethora of graph partitioning algorithms makes it a challenging task to select a partitioner for a given scenario. Different studies exist that provide qualitative insights into the characteristics of graph partitioning algorithms that support a selection. However, in order to enable automatic selection, a quantitative prediction of the partitioning quality, the partitioning run-time and the run-time of subsequent graph processing jobs is needed. In this paper, we propose a machine learning-based approach to provide such a quantitative prediction for different types of edge partitioning algorithms and graph processing workloads. We show that training based on generated graphs achieves high accuracy, which can be further improved when using real-world data. Based on the predictions, the automatic selection reduces the end-to-end run-time on average by 11.1% compared to a random selection, by 17.4% compared to selecting the partitioner that yields the lowest cut size, and by 29.1% compared to the worst strategy, respectively. Furthermore, in 35.7% of the cases, the best strategy was selected.

cs.DC↗