Distributed full-graph training of Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) has been widely adopted to learn large-scale graphs. While recent system advancements can improve the training throughput of GNNs, their practical adoption is limited by the potential accuracy decline. This concern is particularly prominent in deeper and more intricate GNN architectures, where noticeable performance degradation becomes apparent. Moreover, existing works fail to comprehensively consider diverse opportunities for acceleration. Motivated by these deficiencies, we propose Sylvie,a full-graph training system that not only improves the training throughput substantially but also maintains the model quality for universal GNNs. By harnessing the inherent information embedded in the graph data and model structure, Sylvie intelligently optimizes GNN training across three key dimensions: data, time, and execution. It identifies performance-relevant features of the input graph offline as subsequent optimization guidance. Subsequently, Sylvie devises an online convergence-maintenance strategy that adaptively integrates and aligns GNN-specific quantization and inter-epoch asynchronous training with the real-time training characteristics. Extensive experiments demonstrate that Sylvie surpasses existing GNN training systems by up to 17.2× speedup for both shallow and deep GNNs, without compromising the model accuracy.

Graph Transformer is a new architecture that surpasses GNNs in graph learning. While there emerge inspiring algorithm advancements, their practical adoption is still limited, particularly on real-world graphs involving up to millions of nodes. We observe existing graph transformers fail on large-scale graphs mainly due to heavy computation, limited scalability and inferior model quality. Motivated by these observations, we propose TORCHGT, the first efficient, scalable, and accurate graph transformer training system. TORCHGT optimizes training at three different levels. At algorithm level, by harnessing the graph sparsity, TORCHGT introduces a Dual-interleaved Attention which is computation-efficient and accuracy-maintained. At runtime level, TORCHGT scales training across workers with a communicationlight Cluster-aware Graph Parallelism. At kernel level, an Elastic Computation Reformation further optimizes the computation by reducing memory access latency in a dynamic way. Extensive experiments demonstrate that TORCHGT boosts training by up to 62.7× and supports graph sequence lengths of up to 1M.

Sub-model extraction based federated learning has emerged as a popular strategy for training models on resource-constrained devices. However, existing methods treat all clients equally and extract sub-models using predetermined rules, which disregard the statistical heterogeneity across clients and may lead to fierce competition among them. Specifically, this paper identifies that when making predictions, different clients tend to activate different neurons of the entire model related to their respective distributions. If highly activated neurons from some clients with one distribution are incorporated into the sub-model allocated to other clients with different distributions, they will be forced to fit the new distributions, which can hinder their activation over the previous clients and result in a performance reduction. Motivated by this finding, we propose a novel method called FedDSE, which can reduce the conflicts among clients by extracting sub-models based on the data distribution of each client. The core idea of FedDSE is to empower each client to adaptively extract neurons from the entire model based on their activation over the local dataset. We theoretically show that FedDSE can achieve an improved classification score and convergence over general neural networks with the ReLU activation function. Experimental results on various datasets and models show that FedDSE outperforms all state-of-the-art baselines.

While recent deep learning workload schedulers exhibit excellent performance, it is arduous to deploy them in practice due to some substantial defects, including inflexible intrusive manner, exorbitant integration and maintenance cost, limited scalability, as well as opaque decision processes. Motivated by these issues, we design and implement Lucid, a non-intrusive deep learning workload scheduler based on interpretable models. It consists of three innovative modules. First, a two-dimensional optimized profiler is introduced for efficient job metric collection and timely debugging job feedback. Second, Lucid utilizes an indolent packing strategy to circumvent interference. Third, Lucid orchestrates resources based on estimated job priority values and sharing scores to achieve efficient scheduling. Additionally, Lucid promotes model performance maintenance and system transparent adjustment via a well-designed system optimizer. Our evaluation shows that Lucid reduces the average job completion time by up to 1.3× compared with state-of-the-art preemptive scheduler Tiresias. Furthermore, it provides explicit system interpretations and excellent scalability for practical deployment.