Performance Analysis of Graph Neural Network Frameworks

Abstract

Graph neural networks (GNNs) are effective models to address learning problems on graphs and have been successfully applied to numerous domains. To improve the productivity of implementing GNNs, various GNN programming frameworks have been developed. Both the effectiveness (accuracy, loss, etc) and the performance (latency, bandwidth, etc) are essential metrics to evaluate the implementation of GNNs. There are many comparative studies related to the effectiveness of different GNN models on domain tasks. However, the performance characteristics of different GNN frameworks are still lacking. In this study, we evaluate the effectiveness and performance of six popular GNN models, GCN, GIN, GAT, GraphSAGE, MoNet, and GatedGCN, across several common benchmarks under two popular GNN frameworks, PyTorch Geometric and Deep Graph Library. We analyze the training time, GPU utilization, and memory usage of different evaluation settings and the performance of models across different hardware configurations under the two frameworks. Our evaluation provides in-depth observations of performance bottlenecks of GNNs and the performance differences between the two popular GNN frameworks. Our work helps GNN researchers understand the performance differences of the popular GNN frameworks, and gives guidelines for developers to find potential performance bugs of frameworks and optimization possibilities of GNNs.