A Coordinated Strategy for GNN Combining Computational Graph and Operator Optimizations

Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have garnered significant interest across various domains due to their efficacy in learning from graph-structured data. In pursuit of heightened performance, numerous GNN frameworks have emerged recently. However, recent work tends to study performance optimization at the computational graph level and operator level separately, and the existing optimization techniques rely on pattern matching and manual intervention, driven by human expertise. Consequently, their performances remain sub-optimal and sensitive to input graphs and GNN models. In this work, we develop an efficient coordinated strategy named AlphaGNN, which achieves an effective combination of computational graph optimization and operator optimization. To render this coordinated optimization impactful, a rule-based computational graph optimization and a performance-driven operator optimization are proposed. The experimental results confirm that AlphaGNN achieves up to 12.39 × (2.94 × on average) performance improvement over the state-of-the-art methods on diverse GNN models.