Abstract
A well-known issue in mini-batch GNN inference is neighborhood explosion. This results in two challenges for its hardware acceleration: (1) high computation and communication costs resulting in high latency, and (2) low computation-to-communication ratio leading to low hardware utilization. To address these challenges, we propose a hardware mapping framework following the recently proposed GNN design principle of model depth-receptive field decoupling. We show that Decoupled GNNs enjoy significantly higher computation-to-communication ratio, therefore, are more suitable for hardware acceleration. To efficiently map Decoupled GNNs onto CPU-FPGA heterogeneous platforms, we propose the following model-architecture co-optimizations: (1) Model instantiation: according to the bandwidth and computation resources, we determine the number of GNN layers to achieve high hardware utilization; (2) Neighbor selection: to meet the application constraint, we select a small number of important neighbors surrounding the target vertices to improve the throughput without sacrificing accuracy; (3) Hardware mapping: given the model and neighborhood defined above, we determine the accelerator parameters based on our novel hardware templates, enabling fast computation of GNN inference workloads. We evaluate our framework on two state-of-the-art FPGA platforms, using two models (GCN, GraphSAGE). Experiments show that the resulting designs achieve high hardware utilization 88%-94% and significant speedup (1.1x-2.5x) compared with the implementations on state-of-the-art CPU-GPU platform.
Hanqing Zeng
Research Scientist
I design models, algorithms and systems for large scale graph learning.