PCGCN: Partition-Centric Processing for Accelerating Graph Convolutional Network

Inspired by the successes of convolutional neural networks (CNN) in computer vision, the convolutional operation has been moved beyond low-dimension grids (e.g., images) to high-dimensional graph-structured data (e.g., web graphs, social networks), leading to graph convolutional network (GCN). And GCN has been gaining popularity due to its success in real-world applications such as recommendation, natural language processing, etc. Because neural network and graph propagation have high computation complexity, GPUs have been introduced to both neural network training and graph processing. However, it is notoriously difficult to perform efficient GCN computing on data parallel hardware like GPU due to the sparsity and irregularity in graphs. In this paper, we present PCGCN, a novel and general method to accelerate GCN computing by taking advantage of the locality in graphs. We experimentally demonstrate that real-world graphs usually have the clustering property that can be used to enhance the data locality in GCN computing. Then, PCGCN proposes to partition the whole graph into chunks according to locality and process subgraphs with a dual-mode computing strategy which includes a selective and a full processing methods for sparse and dense subgraphs, respectively. Compared to existing state-of-the-art implementations of GCN on real-world and synthetic datasets, our implementation on top of TensorFlow achieves up to 8.8x speedup over the fastest one of the baselines.