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RapidGNN: Energy and Communication-Efficient Distributed Training on Large-Scale Graph Neural Networks

Machine Learning 2025-09-08 v1 Artificial Intelligence

Abstract

Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have become popular across a diverse set of tasks in exploring structural relationships between entities. However, due to the highly connected structure of the datasets, distributed training of GNNs on large-scale graphs poses significant challenges. Traditional sampling-based approaches mitigate the computational loads, yet the communication overhead remains a challenge. This paper presents RapidGNN, a distributed GNN training framework with deterministic sampling-based scheduling to enable efficient cache construction and prefetching of remote features. Evaluation on benchmark graph datasets demonstrates RapidGNN's effectiveness across different scales and topologies. RapidGNN improves end-to-end training throughput by 2.46x to 3.00x on average over baseline methods across the benchmark datasets, while cutting remote feature fetches by over 9.70x to 15.39x. RapidGNN further demonstrates near-linear scalability with an increasing number of computing units efficiently. Furthermore, it achieves increased energy efficiency over the baseline methods for both CPU and GPU by 44% and 32%, respectively.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2509.05207,
  title  = {RapidGNN: Energy and Communication-Efficient Distributed Training on Large-Scale Graph Neural Networks},
  author = {Arefin Niam and Tevfik Kosar and M S Q Zulkar Nine},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2509.05207},
  year   = {2025}
}

Comments

arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:2505.10806

R2 v1 2026-07-01T05:23:22.299Z