Hardware acceleration of graph neural networks

Adam Auten, Matthew Tomei, Rakesh Kumar

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contribution

Abstract

Graph neural networks (GNNs) have been shown to extend the power of machine learning to problems with graph-structured inputs. Recent research has shown that these algorithms can exceed state-of-the-art performance on applications ranging from molecular inference to community detection. We observe that existing execution platforms (including existing machine learning accelerators) are a poor fit for GNNs due to their unique memory access and data movement requirements. We propose, to the best of our knowledge, the first accelerator architecture targeting GNNs. The architecture includes dedicated hardware units to efficiently execute the irregular data movement required for graph computation in GNNs, while also providing high compute throughput required by GNN models. We show that our architecture outperforms existing execution platforms in terms of inference latency on several key GNN benchmarks (e.g., 7.5x higher performance than GPUs and 18x higher performance than CPUs at iso-bandwidth).

Original languageEnglish (US)
Title of host publication2020 57th ACM/IEEE Design Automation Conference, DAC 2020
PublisherInstitute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Inc.
ISBN (Electronic)9781450367257
DOIs
StatePublished - Jul 2020
Event57th ACM/IEEE Design Automation Conference, DAC 2020 - Virtual, San Francisco, United States
Duration: Jul 20 2020Jul 24 2020

Publication series

NameProceedings - Design Automation Conference
Volume2020-July
ISSN (Print)0738-100X

Conference

Conference57th ACM/IEEE Design Automation Conference, DAC 2020
Country/TerritoryUnited States
CityVirtual, San Francisco
Period7/20/207/24/20

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Computer Science Applications
  • Control and Systems Engineering
  • Electrical and Electronic Engineering
  • Modeling and Simulation

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