Redundancy-Free High-Performance Dynamic GNN Training with Hierarchical Pipeline Parallelism

Temporal Graph Neural Networks(TGNNs) extend the success of Graph Neural Networks to dynamic graphs. Distributed TGNN training requires efficiently tackling temporal dependency, which often leads to excessive cross-device communication that generates significant redundant data. However, existing systems are unable to remove the redundancy in data reuse and transfer, and suffer from severe communication overhead in a distributed setting. This paper presents Sven, an algorithm and system co-designed TGNN training library for the end-to-end performance optimization on multi-node multi-GPU systems. Exploiting dependency patterns of TGNN models and characteristics of dynamic graph datasets, we design redundancy-free data organization and load-balancing partitioning strategies that mitigate the redundant data communication and evenly partition dynamic graphs at the vertex level. Furthermore, we develop a hierarchical pipeline mechanism integrating data prefetching, micro-batch pipelining, and asynchronous pipelining to mitigate the communication overhead. As the first scaling study on the memory-based TGNNs training, experiments conducted on an HPC cluster of 64 GPUs show that Sven can achieve up to 1.7x-3.3x speedup over the state-of-art approaches and a factor of up to 5.26x communication efficiency improvement.