Busy GPUs: Sampling and Pipelining Method Speeds Up Deep Learning on Large Graphs

Lauren Hinkel | MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab
November 29, 2022

Graphs, a potentially extensive web of nodes connected by edges, can be used to express and interrogate relationships between data, like social connections, financial transactions, traffic, energy grids, and molecular interactions. As researchers collect more data and build out these graphical pictures, researchers will need faster and more efficient methods, as well as more computational power, to conduct deep learning on them, in the way of graph neural networks (GNN).

Now, a new method, called SALIENT (SAmpling, sLIcing, and data movemeNT), developed by researchers at MIT and IBM Research, improves the training and inference performance by addressing three key bottlenecks in computation. This dramatically cuts down on the runtime of GNNs on large datasets, which, for example, contain on the scale of 100 million nodes and 1 billion edges. Further, the team found that the technique scales well when computational power is added from one to 16 graphical processing units (GPUs). The work was presented at the Fifth Conference on Machine Learning and Systems.

Complete article from MIT News.