Adaptive Parallel Training for Graph Neural Networks

There are several strategies to parallelize graph neural network (GNN) training over multiple GPUs. We observe that there is no consistent winner (i.e., with the shortest running time), and the optimal strategy depends on the graph dataset, GNN model, training algorithm, and hardware configurations. As such, we design the APT system to automatically select efficient parallelization strategies for GNN training tasks. To this end, we analyze the trade-offs of the strategies and design simple yet effective cost models to compare their execution time and facilitate strategy selection. Moreover, we also propose a general abstraction of the strategies, which allows to implement a unified execution engine that can be configured to run different strategies. Our experiments show that APT usually chooses the optimal or a close to optimal strategy, and the training time can be reduced by over 2x compared with always using a single strategy. APT is open-source at https://github.com/kaihaoma/APT.