On Pipelined GCN with Communication-Efficient Sampling and Inclusion-Aware Caching

Shulin Wang, Qiang Yu, Xiong Wang, Yuqing Li, Hai Jin

Abstract: Graph convolutional network (GCN) has achieved enormous success in learning structural information from unstructured data. As graphs become increasingly large, distributed training for GCNs is severely prolonged by frequent cross-worker communications. Existing efforts to improve the training efficiency often come at the expense of GCN performance, while the communication overhead persists. In this paper, we propose PSC-GCN, a holistic pipelined framework for distributed GCN training with communication-efficient sampling and inclusion-aware caching, to address the communication bottleneck while ensuring satisfactory model performance. Specifically, we devise an asynchronous pre-fetching scheme to retrieve stale statistics (features, embedding, gradient) of boundary nodes in advance, such that the embedding aggregation and model update are pipelined with statistics transmission. To alleviate communication volume and staleness effect, we introduce a variance-reduction based sampling policy, which prioritizes inner nodes over boundary ones for reducing the access frequency to remote neighbors, thus mitigating cross-worker statistics exchange. Complementing graph sampling, a feature caching module is co-designed to buffer hot nodes with high inclusion probability, ensuring that frequently sampled nodes will be available in local memory. Extensive evaluations on real-world datasets show the superiority of PSC-GCN over state-of-the-art methods, where we can reduce training time by 72%-80% without sacrificing model accuracy.