Efficient Asynchronous GCN Training on a GPU Cluster
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Bibliographic record
Abstract
Research on Graph Convolutional Networks (GCNs) has increasingly gained popularity in recent years due to the powerful representational capacity of graphs. A common assumption in traditional synchronous parallel training of GCNs using multiple GPUs is that load is perfectly balanced. However, this assumption may not hold in a real-world scenario where there can be imbalances in workloads among GPUs for various reasons. In a synchronous parallel implementation, a straggler in the system can limit the overall speed up of parallel training. To address these performance issues, this research investigates approaches for asynchronous decentralized parallel training of GCNs on a GPU cluster. The techniques investigated are based on graph clustering and the Gossip protocol. The research specifically adapts the approach of Cluster GCN, which uses graph partitioning for SGD based training, and combines with a gossip algorithm specifically designed for a GPU cluster to periodically exchange gradients among randomly chosen partners (GPUs). In addition, it incorporates a work pool mechanism for load balancing among GPUs. The gossip algorithm is proven to be deadlock free. The implementation is performed on a deep learning cluster with 8 Tesla V100 GPUs per compute node, and PyTorch and DGL as the software platforms. Experiments are conducted on different benchmark datasets. The results demonstrate superior performance with similar accuracy scores, as compared to traditional synchronous training which uses “all reduce” to synchronously accumulate parallel training results.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
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Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it