Dynamic Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) combine temporal information with GNNs to capture structural, temporal, and contextual relationships in dynamic graphs simultaneously, leading to enhanced performance in various applications. As the demand for dynamic GNNs continues to grow, numerous models and frameworks have emerged to cater to different application needs. There is a pressing need for a comprehensive survey that evaluates the performance, strengths, and limitations of various approaches in this domain. This paper aims to fill this gap by offering a thorough comparative analysis and experimental evaluation of dynamic GNNs. It covers 91 dynamic GNN models with a novel taxonomy, 17 dynamic GNN training frameworks, and commonly used benchmarks. We also evaluate the experimental results of ten representative dynamic GNN models and five frameworks on six datasets. Evaluation metrics focus on convergence accuracy, training efficiency, and GPU memory usage, enabling a thorough performance comparison across various models and frameworks. From the analysis and evaluation results, we identify key challenges and offer principles for future research to enhance the design of models and frameworks in the dynamic GNNs field. Our code is made publicly available athttps://github.com/fengwudi/DGNN_model_and_data

Memory-based temporal graph neural network (MTGNN) models are effective for predicting temporal graphs by using node memory and message-passing modules to capture temporal and structural information, respectively. However, distributed training for large graphs presents challenges such as accuracy loss and decreased efficiency due to remote features and memory transmission. Despite improvements in MTGNN system optimizations, issues like dynamic load imbalances, communication overhead, and memory staleness persist. To tackle these challenges, we introduce MemShare, a distributed MTGNN system. MemShare introduces a novel shared node memory paradigm that utilizes a small subset of shared nodes across machines and GPUs to reduce distributed communication for memory management. It incorporates techniques like shared nodes-centric graph partitioning, shared nodes-aware boundary decay sampling, and shared nodes-targeted synchronous smoothing aggregation. Experiments show that MemShare outperforms existing distributed MTGNN systems in accuracy and training efficiency.

Graph neural networks (GNNs) are effective models for analyzing graph-structured data, but encounter challenges when training on large distributed graphs. Existing GNN training frameworks use sampling parallelism and historical embedding methods to support distributed training and enhance efficiency. However, these methods suffer from issues like stale historical embeddings, imbalanced communication messages, and redundant storage and computation costs. In this paper, we present Emma, a distributed GNN training framework that incorporates source node centric chunking for frequent updates of embeddings and balanced communication, as well as a moving message aggregation technique to boost training efficiency and reduce storage costs. Experimental results show that Emma significantly enhances training efficiency by reducing computation and communication overhead, leading to a notable speedup while maintaining convergence accuracy compared to state-of-the-art distributed GNN training methods.