GNNOne: A Unified System Optimizations for GNN Kernels

Graph Neural Networks (GNN) involve two basic sparse kernels, SDDMM and SpMM, on which all GNN models could be built. Prior works have explored piecemeal solutions by using different storage formats and computation paradigms, resulting in excess memory consumption, and have not yet realized their full potential. This paper, called GnnOne, studies these two basic sparse kernels in GPU and shows that they can be built on the same system design principle of data load being the limiting factor irrespective of their computing paradigms. Hence GnnOne presents a unified two-stage data-load design that provides greater performance through novel techniques of data-load balancing, data-load optimizations, and data-reuse. Such a unified design also enables the usage of a single sparse storage format to increase productivity, memory saving, and reduce maintenance. Evaluations show that the proposed system achieves an average speedup of 6.25× and 6.02× for SpMM and SDDMM over many prior works for different feature lengths. For GNN training, GnnOne achieves 2.01× average speedup over dgNN, 2.28× average speedup over DGL on 3 different GNN models.