Optimizing Task Placement and Online Scheduling for Distributed GNN Training Acceleration in Heterogeneous Systems

Training Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) on large graphs is resource-intensive and time-consuming, mainly due to the large graph data that cannot be fit into the memory of a single machine, but have to be fetched from distributed graph storage and processed on the go. Unlike distributed deep neural network (DNN) training, the bottleneck in distributed GNN training lies largely in large graph data transmission for constructing mini-batches of training samples. Existing solutions often advocate data-computation colocation, and do not work well with limited resources and heterogeneous training devices in heterogeneous clusters. The potentials of strategical task placement and optimal scheduling of data transmission and task execution have not been well explored. This paper designs an efficient algorithm framework for task placement and execution scheduling of distributed GNN training in heterogeneous systems, to better resource utilization, improve execution pipelining, and expedite training completion. Our framework consists of two modules: (i) an online scheduling algorithm that schedules the execution of training tasks, and the data transmission plan; and (ii) an exploratory task placement scheme that decides the placement of each training task. We conduct thorough theoretical analysis, testbed experiments and simulation studies, and observe up to 48% training speed-up with our algorithm as compared to representative baselines in our testbed settings.