{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/can-graph-reordering-speed-up-graph-neural","title":"Can Graph Reordering Speed Up Graph Neural Network Training? An Experimental Study","arxiv_id":"2409.11129","date":"2024-09-17","proceeding":null,"authors":["Nikolai Merkel","Pierre Toussing","Ruben Mayer","Hans-Arno Jacobsen"],"abstract":"Graph neural networks (GNNs) are a type of neural network capable of learning on graph-structured data. However, training GNNs on large-scale graphs is challenging due to iterative aggregations of high-dimensional features from neighboring vertices within sparse graph structures combined with neural network operations. The sparsity of graphs frequently results in suboptimal memory access patterns and longer training time. Graph reordering is an optimization strategy aiming to improve the graph data layout. It has shown to be effective to speed up graph analytics workloads, but its effect on the performance of GNN training has not been investigated yet. The generalization of reordering to GNN performance is nontrivial, as multiple aspects must be considered: GNN hyper-parameters such as the number of layers, the number of hidden dimensions, and the feature size used in the GNN model, neural network operations, large intermediate vertex states, and GPU acceleration. In our work, we close this gap by performing an empirical evaluation of 12 reordering strategies in two state-of-the-art GNN systems, PyTorch Geometric and Deep Graph Library. Our results show that graph reordering is effective in reducing training time for CPU- and GPU-based training, respectively. Further, we find that GNN hyper-parameters influence the effectiveness of reordering, that reordering metrics play an important role in selecting a reordering strategy, that lightweight reordering performs better for GPU-based than for CPU-based training, and that invested reordering time can in many cases be amortized.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2409.11129v1","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2409.11129v1.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"abstracts"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"can-graph-reordering-speed-up-graph-neural","repo_url":"https://github.com/nikolaimerkel/reordering","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":0,"framework":"pytorch","reach":{"status":"ok"}}],"tasks":[{"task_slug":null,"task_name":"CPU"},{"task_slug":null,"task_name":"GPU"},{"task_slug":"graph-neural-network","task_name":"Graph Neural Network"}],"methods":[{"method_slug":null,"method_name":"Library"},{"method_slug":"speed","method_name":"SPEED"}],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"syntology_url":null,"atlas_url":"https://app.syntology.ai/?focus=2409.11129","mcp":{"get_harvested_code_for_paper":{"arxiv_id":"2409.11129"}},"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers","read_at":"2026-09-24T18:15:14+00:00","read_at_is":"when the build read Syntology's graph, not when any sample ran","claim":"Per-sample execution status on synthesized fixtures; not a correctness claim about the paper. Samples come from repositories linked to the paper, official or community; repo_kind says which.","repos":[{"provenance":"external:paperswithcode_snapshot_2025-07-28","url":"https://github.com/nikolaimerkel/reordering","reach":{"status":"ok"}}],"summary":{"ran":1},"by_repo_kind":{"official":{"samples":1,"ran":1,"repositories":1}},"repo_kind_vocabulary":{"official":"The archive marks this repository official for the paper","named_in_paper":"The archive records that the paper mentions this repository; it is not marked official","listed":"In the archive's code links for this paper, not marked official and not recorded as mentioned in the paper","found_in_text":"Syntology found this repository in the paper's own text; whether it is the authors' implementation is not asserted","community":"Not in the archive's code links for this paper; a community repository Syntology harvested"},"n_pointer_only_for_licence":1,"samples":[{"code_sha256_prefix":"575e8b8ea951fecf","entry":"mapping_to_permutation","repo":"nikolaimerkel/reordering","repo_kind":"official","path":"reordering/create_reordered_graphs.py","file_url":"https://github.com/nikolaimerkel/reordering/blob/HEAD/reordering/create_reordered_graphs.py","link_basis":"first_harvest_node","language":"python","status":"ran","verification_level":1,"contract_check":null,"metamorphic_tier":null,"behaviour_fingerprint":false,"licence":"NONE","inline_ok":false,"mcp_get_code":{"code_sha256":"575e8b8ea951fecf"}}]},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}