Training Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) on real-world graphs consisting of billions of nodes and edges is quite challenging, primarily due to the substantial memory needed to store the graph and its intermediate node and edge features, and there is a pressing need to speed up the training process. A common approach to achieve speed up is to divide the graph into many smaller subgraphs, which are then distributed across multiple GPUs in one or more machines and processed in parallel. However, existing distributed methods require frequent and substantial cross-GPU communication, leading to significant time overhead and progressively diminishing scalability. Here, we introduce CoFree-GNN, a novel distributed GNN training framework that significantly speeds up the training process by implementing communication-free training. The framework utilizes a Vertex Cut partitioning, i.e., rather than partitioning the graph by cutting the edges between partitions, the Vertex Cut partitions the edges and duplicates the node information to preserve the graph structure. Furthermore, the framework maintains high model accuracy by incorporating a reweighting mechanism to handle a distorted graph distribution that arises from the duplicated nodes. We also propose a modified DropEdge technique to further speed up the training process. Using an extensive set of experiments on real-world networks, we demonstrate that CoFree-GNN speeds up the GNN training process by up to 10 times over the existing state-of-the-art GNN training approaches.

CoFree-GNN是一个新颖的分布式图神经网络训练框架，通过实现无通信训练显著加速训练过程。该框架利用顶点切分分区，通过在边上切分而不是切分分区之间的边，将节点信息复制以保留图结构，并通过重新赋权机制处理由复制节点引起的扭曲图分布。同时，通过引入修正的DropEdge技术进一步加快训练速度。在实际网络上进行的大量实验表明，CoFree-GNN相比现有最先进的GNN训练方法，训练过程速度最多提高10倍。

无通信的顶点切割分布式GNN训练