EDBT 2026 Demo / reviewers in the wild / expert
Changji Li
dblp:208/5231
· DBLP profile ↗
9ranked-venue papers in the field
1as first author
6since 2021 · last 2026
0000-0003-2768-1224ORCID · corroborated
Domains — venue-derived; a paper can count in several
Database Systems & Data Management · 7 (1 first)Data Mining & Knowledge Discovery · 2
| Year | Publication | Venue | Position |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2026 | Hitcher: Efficient GPU-based Vector Search via Cluster-Centric Kernel and Hitch-Ride OrderingabstractSimilarity-based vector search, which retrieves the most similar vectors to a given query vector from a large vector dataset, underlies many applications such as search, recommendation, and Large Language Models (LLMs). Some systems run vector search on GPUs to enjoy GPU's high parallelism, but we observe that they are limited in query throughput and latency. In particular, their query-centric GPU kernel conducts computation independently for each query, failing to reuse data loaded to the GPU shared memory across queries and leading to a low GPU compute utilization. While their batch-based task reordering rearranges computation for queries in a batch to reduce CPU-GPU data transfer, but latency is prolonged since each query needs to wait for its slowest task. To tackle these problems, we propose Hitcher. Specifically, to reuse data across queries and improve GPU utilization, Hitcher implements a cluster-centric GPU kernel to batch computation on the same data for multiple queries. To reduce query latency, Hitcher adopts the hitch-ride ordering, which preserves the arrival order for query processing while batching computation across queries to improve efficiency. Hitcher can also offload computation tasks to the CPU to reduce CPU-GPU data transfer and utilize multiple GPUs. Experimental results show that Hitcher achieves up to 22× lower P99 query latency and 9× higher query throughput when compared with the state-of-the-art GPU-based vector query processing systems. Qihui Zhou, Changji Li, Guanxian Jiang, Chenhao Ma 0001, Xiao Yan 0002, Yu Mao 0001, Ming-Chang Yang, James Cheng |
KDD (1) | 2 |
| 2025 | CARINA: An Efficient CXL-Oriented Embedding Serving System for Recommendation ModelsabstractEmbedding-based recommendation models (ERMs) require large memory to host huge embedding tables and involve massive data traffic to read the embeddings. As a new interconnect, CXL suits ERMs since it can scale up single-machine memory with performant remote memory devices. However, directly running DRAM-based ERM serving systems on CXL yields poor performance because the bandwidth of CXL is notably lower than DRAM and can be easily saturated, making CXL memory the bottleneck. The non-uniform memory access (NUMA) architecture in modern CXL servers further decreased the system performance. In this paper, we design Carina for ERM serving on heterogeneous memory with CXL by considering such bandwidth asymmetry. In particular, Carina balances the memory access from different memory devices by storing hot embeddings with high access frequencies on DRAM and specifying the placement of embedding tables on the NUMA nodes. Moreover, Carina adopts bandwidth-aware task execution, which decomposes each batch of ERM requests into fine-grained tasks and schedules the tasks to control the real-time utilization of CXL bandwidth to avoid instantaneous saturation. We evaluate Carina under real CXL devices and find that it outperforms a CXL-oblivious baseline by an average of 5.38x and 4.04x in system throughput and request latency, respectively. Peiqi Yin, Qihui Zhou, Xiao Yan 0002, Chao Wang 0125, Eric Lo 0001, Changji Li, Lan Lu, Hua Fan 0002, Wenchao Zhou, Ming-Chang Yang, James Cheng |
Proc. ACM Manag. Data | 6 |
| 2024 | Atom: An Efficient Query Serving System for Embedding-based Knowledge Graph Reasoning with Operator-level BatchingabstractKnowledge graph reasoning (KGR) answers logical queries over a knowledge graph (KG), and embedding-based KGR (EKGR) becomes popular recently, which embeds both queries and KG entities such that the vector embeddings of a query and its answer entities are similar. Compared with traditional KGR methods based on subgraph matching, EKGR produces fewer intermediate results and is more robust to missing and noisy information in the KG. However, existing systems are inefficient for serving online EKGR queries because they can only batch queries of the same type for execution (i.e., query-level batching ) and hence have limited batching opportunities due to the heterogeneity of queries. To serve EKGR queries efficiently, we propose the Atom system with operator-level batching, which decomposes queries into operators and batches operators of the same type from different queries for execution. The insight is that the types of operators are far fewer than the types of queries, and thus different queries typically share common operators, yielding more batching opportunities. To schedule the operators, Atom adopts a hybrid policy, which improves system throughput and avoids starving rare operators. For efficiency, Atom incorporates system optimizations including two-level pipeline, opportunistic submission, pre-allocated memory buffer, and tailored GPU kernels. Experiment results show that compared with existing systems, Atom can improve query throughput by over 20x and reduce query latency by over 5x. Micro experiments suggest that the designs and optimizations are effective in improving system performance. Qihui Zhou, Peiqi Yin, Xiao Yan 0002, Changji Li, Guanxian Jiang, James Cheng |
Proc. ACM Manag. Data | 4 |
| 2022 | G-Tran: A High Performance Distributed Graph Database with a Decentralized ArchitectureabstractGraph transaction processing poses unique challenges such as random data access due to the irregularity of graph structures, low throughput and high abort rate due to the relatively large read/write sets in graph transactions. To address these challenges, we present G-Tran, a remote direct memory access (RDMA)-enabled distributed in-memory graph database with serializable and snapshot isolation support. First, we propose a graph-native data store to achieve good data locality and fast data access for transactional updates and queries. Second, G-Tran adopts a fully decentralized architecture that leverages RDMA to process distributed transactions with the massively parallel processing (MPP) model, which can achieve high performance by utilizing all computing resources. In addition, we propose a new multi-version optimistic concurrency control (MV-OCC) protocol with two optimizations to address the issue of large read/write sets in graph transactions. Extensive experiments show that G-Tran achieves competitive performance compared with other popular graph databases on benchmark workloads. Changji Li, Chenguang Zheng, Chenghuan Huang, Juncheng Fang, James Cheng, Jie Zhang 0046 |
Proc. VLDB Endow. | 2 |
| 2022 | ByteGraph: A High-Performance Distributed Graph Database in ByteDanceabstractMost products at ByteDance, e.g., TikTok, Douyin, and Toutiao, naturally generate massive amounts of graph data. To efficiently store, query and update massive graph data is challenging for the broad range of products at ByteDance with various performance requirements. We categorize graph workloads at ByteDance into three types: online analytical, transaction, and serving processing, where each workload has its own characteristics. Existing graph databases have different performance bottlenecks in handling these workloads and none can efficiently handle the scale of graphs at ByteDance. We developed ByteGraph to process these graph workloads with high throughput, low latency and high scalability. There are several key designs in ByteGraph that make it efficient for processing our workloads, including edge-trees to store adjacency lists for high parallelism and low memory usage, adaptive optimizations on thread pools and indexes, and geographic replications to achieve fault tolerance and availability. ByteGraph has been in production use for several years and its performance has shown to be robust for processing a wide range of graph workloads at ByteDance. Changji Li, Yingqian Hu, Xiangchen Li, Dongqing Han, Huiming Zhu, Xuwei Fu, Tingwei Wu, Hongfei Tan, Hengtian Ding, Mengjin Liu, Kangcheng Wang, Ting Ye, Chenguang Zheng, James Cheng |
Proc. VLDB Endow. | 1 |
| 2022 | ByteGNN: Efficient Graph Neural Network Training at Large ScaleabstractGraph neural networks (GNNs) have shown excellent performance in a wide range of applications such as recommendation, risk control, and drug discovery. With the increase in the volume of graph data, distributed GNN systems become essential to support efficient GNN training. However, existing distributed GNN training systems suffer from various performance issues including high network communication cost, low CPU utilization, and poor end-to-end performance. In this paper, we propose ByteGNN, which addresses the limitations in existing distributed GNN systems with three key designs: (1) an abstraction of mini-batch graph sampling to support high parallelism, (2) a two-level scheduling strategy to improve resource utilization and to reduce the end-to-end GNN training time, and (3) a graph partitioning algorithm tailored for GNN workloads. Our experiments show that ByteGNN outperforms the state-of-the-art distributed GNN systems with up to 3.5--23.8 times faster end-to-end execution, 2--6 times higher CPU utilization, and around half of the network communication cost. Chenguang Zheng, Yuxuan Cheng, Zhezheng Song, Yifan Wu 0002, Changji Li, James Cheng |
Proc. VLDB Endow. | 6 |
| 2020 | High Performance Distributed OLAP on Property Graphs with GrasperabstractAchieving high performance OLAP over large graphs is a challenging problem and has received great attention recently because of its broad spectrum of applications. Existing systems have various performance bottlenecks due to limitations such as low parallelism and high network overheads. This Demo presents Grasper, an RDMA-enabled distributed graph OLAP system, which adopts a series of new system designs to overcome the challenges of OLAP on graphs. The take-aways for Demo attendees are: (1)~a good understanding of the challenges of processing graph OLAP queries; (2)~useful insights about where Grasper's good performance comes from; (3)~inspirations about how to design an efficient graph OLAP system by comparing Grasper with existing systems. Bowen Wu 0003, Shiyuan Deng, Chenghuan Huang, Changji Li, James Cheng |
SIGMOD Conference | 5 |
| 2019 | A Representation Learning Framework for Property GraphsabstractRepresentation learning on graphs, also called graph embedding, has demonstrated its significant impact on a series of machine learning applications such as classification, prediction and recommendation. However, existing work has largely ignored the rich information contained in the properties (or attributes) of both nodes and edges of graphs in modern applications, e.g., those represented by property graphs. To date, most existing graph embedding methods either focus on plain graphs with only the graph topology, or consider properties on nodes only. We propose PGE, a graph representation learning framework that incorporates both node and edge properties into the graph embedding procedure. PGE uses node clustering to assign biases to differentiate neighbors of a node and leverages multiple data-driven matrices to aggregate the property information of neighbors sampled based on a biased strategy. PGE adopts the popular inductive model for neighborhood aggregation. We provide detailed analyses on the efficacy of our method and validate the performance of PGE by showing how PGE achieves better embedding results than the state-of-the-art graph embedding methods on benchmark applications such as node classification and link prediction over real-world datasets. Changji Li, James Cheng, Ming-Chang Yang |
KDD | 3 |
| 2019 | Large Scale Graph Mining with G-MinerabstractThis Demo presents G-Miner, a distributed system for graph mining. The take-aways for Demo attendees are: (1) a good understanding of the challenges of various graph mining workloads; (2) useful insights on how to design a good system for graph mining by comparing G-Miner with existing systems on performance, expressiveness and user-friendliness; and (3) how to use G-Miner for interactive graph analytics. Xiaoxi Wang, Chenghuan Huang, Juncheng Fang, Changji Li, James Cheng |
SIGMOD Conference | 6 |