Graph convolutional neural networks (GCNs) have achieved state-of-the-art performance on graph-structured data analysis. Like traditional neural networks, training and inference of GCNs are accelerated with GPUs. Therefore, characterizing and understanding the execution pattern of GCNs on GPU is important for both software and hardware optimization. Unfortunately, to the best of our knowledge, there is no detailed characterization effort of GCN workloads on GPU. In this paper, we characterize GCN workloads at inference stage and explore GCN models on NVIDIA V100 GPU. Given the characterization and exploration, we propose several useful guidelines for both software optimization and hardware optimization for the efficient execution of GCNs on GPU.
Graph Convolutional Networks (GCNs) are recently getting much attention in bioinformatics and chemoinformatics as a state-of-the-art machine learning approach with high accuracy. GCNs process convolutional operations along with graph structures, and GPUs are used to process enormous operations including sparse-dense matrix multiplication (SpMM) when the graph structure is expressed as an adjacency matrix with sparse matrix format. However, the SpMM operation on small graph, where the number of nodes is tens or hundreds, hardly exploits high parallelism or compute power of GPU. Therefore, SpMM …
Skeleton-based Graph Convolutional Networks (GCNs) models for action recognition have achieved excellent prediction accuracy in the field. However, limited by large model and computation complexity, GCNs for action recognition like 2s-AGCN have insufficient power-efficiency and throughput on GPU. Thus, the demand of model reduction and hardware acceleration for low-power GCNs action recognition application becomes continuously higher. To address challenges above, this paper proposes a runtime sparse feature compress accelerator with hybrid pruning method: RFC-HyPGCN. First, this method skips b…
Heterogeneous graph neural networks (HGNNs) deliver powerful capacity in heterogeneous graph representation learning. The execution of HGNNs is usually accelerated by GPUs. Therefore, characterizing and understanding the execution pattern of HGNNs on GPUs is important for both software and hardware optimizations. Unfortunately, there is no detailed characterization effort of HGNN workloads on GPUs. In this paper, we characterize HGNN workloads at inference phase and explore the execution of HGNNs on GPU, to disclose the execution semantic and execution pattern of HGNNs. Given the characterizat…
Scientists are increasingly exploring and utilizing the massive parallelism of general-purpose accelerators such as GPUs for scientific breakthroughs. As a result, datacenters, hyperscalers, national computing centers, and supercomputers have procured hardware to support this evolving application paradigm. These systems contain hundreds to tens of thousands of accelerators, enabling peta- and exa-scale levels of compute for scientific workloads. Recent work demonstrated that power management (PM) can impact application performance in CPU-based HPC systems, even when machines have the same arch…
Institute of Computing Technology (ICT), Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS)（中国科学院计算技术研究所）；University of Chinese Academy of Sciences (UCAS)（中国科学院大学）
Graph neural network (GNN) has been demonstrated to be a powerful model in many domains for its effectiveness in learning over graphs. To scale GNN training for large graphs, a widely adopted approach is distributed training which accelerates training using multiple computing nodes. Maximizing the performance is essential, but the execution of distributed GNN training remains preliminarily understood. In this work, we provide an in-depth analysis of distributed GNN training on GPUs, revealing several significant observations and providing useful guidelines for both software optimization and ha…
In this work, we first characterize the hybrid execution patterns of GCNs on Intel Xeon CPU. Guided by the characterization, we design a GCN accelerator, HyGCN, using a hybrid architecture to efficiently perform GCNs. Specifically, first, we build a new programming model to exploit the fine-grained parallelism for our hardware design. Second, we propose a hardware design with two efficient processing engines to alleviate the irregularity of Aggregation phase and leverage the regularity of Combination phase. Besides, these engines can exploit various parallelism and reuse highly reusable data e…
We investigate the performance of the concurrency mechanisms available on NVIDIA's new Ampere GPU microarchitecture under deep learning training and inference workloads. In contrast to previous studies that treat the GPU as a black box, we examine scheduling at the microarchitectural level. We find that the lack of fine-grained preemption mechanisms, robust task prioritization options, and contention-aware thread block placement policies limits the effectiveness of NVIDIA's concurrency mechanisms. In summary, the sequential nature of deep learning workloads and their fluctuating resource requi…
Cloud GPU servers have become the de facto way for deep learning practitioners to train complex models on large-scale datasets. However, it is challenging to determine the appropriate cluster configuration---e.g., server type and number---for different training workloads while balancing the trade-offs in training time, cost, and model accuracy. Adding to the complexity is the potential to reduce the monetary cost by using cheaper, but revocable, transient GPU servers. In this work, we analyze distributed training performance under diverse cluster configurations using CM-DARE, a cloud-based mea…
University of California, Los Angeles（加利福尼亚大学洛杉矶分校）
Graph convolutional networks (GCNs) have been introduced to effectively process non-euclidean graph data. However, GCNs incur large amounts of irregularity in computation and memory access, which prevents efficient use of traditional neural network accelerators. Moreover, existing dedicated GCN accelerators demand high memory volumes and are difficult to implement onto resource limited edge devices. In this work, we propose LW-GCN, a lightweight FPGA-based accelerator with a software-hardware co-designed process to tackle irregularity in computation and memory access in GCN inference. LW-GCN d…
Characterizing compute kernel execution behavior on GPUs for efficient task scheduling is a non-trivial task. We address this with a simple model enabling portable and fast predictions among different GPUs using only hardware-independent features. This model is built based on random forests using 189 individual compute kernels from benchmarks such as Parboil, Rodinia, Polybench-GPU and SHOC. Evaluation of the model performance using cross-validation yields a median Mean Average Percentage Error (MAPE) of 8.86-52.00% and 1.84-2.94%, for time respectively power prediction across five different G…
Deep learning models are increasingly used for end-user applications, supporting both novel features such as facial recognition, and traditional features, e.g. web search. To accommodate high inference throughput, it is common to host a single pre-trained Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) in dedicated cloud-based servers with hardware accelerators such as Graphics Processing Units (GPUs). However, GPUs can be orders of magnitude more expensive than traditional Central Processing Unit (CPU) servers. These resources could also be under-utilized facing dynamic workloads, which may result in infl…
The graph convolutional network (GCN) is a go-to solution for machine learning on graphs, but its training is notoriously difficult to scale both in terms of graph size and the number of model parameters. Although some work has explored training on large-scale graphs (e.g., GraphSAGE, ClusterGCN, etc.), we pioneer efficient training of large-scale GCN models (i.e., ultra-wide, overparameterized models) with the proposal of a novel, distributed training framework. Our proposed training methodology, called GIST, disjointly partitions the parameters of a GCN model into several, smaller sub-GCNs t…
Boston University（波士顿大学）；Pacific Northwest National Laboratory（太平洋西北国家实验室）；The University of Hong Kong（香港大学）；Zhejiang University（浙江大学）；Microsoft（微软）
Deep learning systems have been successfully applied to Euclidean data such as images, video, and audio. In many applications, however, information and their relationships are better expressed with graphs. Graph Convolutional Networks (GCNs) appear to be a promising approach to efficiently learn from graph data structures, having shown advantages in many critical applications. As with other deep learning modalities, hardware acceleration is critical. The challenge is that real-world graphs are often extremely large and unbalanced; this poses significant performance demands and design challenge…
Neural networks are a revolutionary but immature technique that is fast evolving and heavily relies on data. To benefit from the newest development and newly available data, we want the gap between research and production as small as possibly. On the other hand, differing from traditional machine learning models, neural network is not just yet another statistic model, but a model for the natural processing engine --- the brain. In this work, we describe a neural network library named {\texttt akid}. It provides higher level of abstraction for entities (abstracted as blocks) in nature upon the …
