An Edge Attribute-Wise Partitioning and Distributed Processing of R-GCN Using GPUs

R-GCN (Relational Graph Convolutional Network) is one of GNNs (Graph Neural Networks). The model tries predicting latent information by considering directions and types of edges in graph-structured data, such as knowledge bases. The model builds weight matrices to each edge attribute. Thus, the size of the neural network increases linearly with the number of edge types. Although GPUs can be used for accelerating the R-GCN processing, there is a possibility that the size of weight matrices exceeds GPU device memory. To address this issue, in this paper, an edge attribute-wise partitioning is proposed for R-GCN. The proposed partitioning divides the model and graph data so that R-GCN can be accelerated by using multiple GPUs. Also, the proposed approach can be applied to sequential execution on a single GPU. Both the cases can accelerate the R-GCN processing with large graph data, where the original model cannot be fit into a device memory of a single GPU without partitioning. Experimental results demonstrate that our partitioning method accelerates R-GCN by up to 3.28 times using four GPUs compared to CPU execution for a dataset with more than 1.6 million nodes and 5 million edges. Also, the proposed approach can accelerate the execution even with a single GPU by 1.55 times compared to the CPU execution for a dataset with 0.8 million nodes and 2 million edges.