Collaborative Research: SHF: Small: Reimagining Communication Bottlenecks in GNN Acceleration through Collaborative Locality Enhancement and Compression Co-Design

数字革命产生了大量相互关联的数据，通常以图表的形式表示，这些数据与许多关键的现实世界应用程序相关。这导致了图形神经网络(GNN)的日益流行，这是一种将人工智能(AI)的好处扩展到基于图形的应用程序的技术。GNN具有显著影响社会的潜力，从加快药物发现和防止供应链中断，到避免连锁电网故障和识别社交媒体上的错误信息。然而，由于图的巨大尺寸和复杂性质(如极端稀疏性和不规则性)造成的计算效率低下，这种潜力的实现目前受到阻碍，这给GNN的实际部署带来了挑战。该项目旨在弥合全球导航卫星网络所需的计算效率与其目前性能之间的差距，这主要是由于全球导航卫星网络计算所需的通信负荷特别大。此外，该项目通过提高罗切斯特大学和印第安纳大学人工智能和系统相关课程和外联活动的质量，丰富了美国本科生和研究生的教育经验。这一研究项目的成功完成可以释放GNN的巨大潜力，以解决医药、公共基础设施和经济发展等领域的问题，以及对共和国的正常运作和经济繁荣至关重要的许多其他问题。该项目旨在开发一种革命性的通信约简方法，通过软硬件协同设计将动态通用图形局部性增强和高比率压缩有机地结合在一起。这项研究围绕三个主要方面展开：(1)通过硬件-软件联合设计开发动态图形局部性增强器，与当前领先的方法相比，提供显著的通用性和额外的通信需求减少。(2)创建一个高效的有损压缩器，该压缩器能够对图形数据进行高比率、错误有界的压缩和解压缩，包括图形嵌入和拓扑信息。(3)研究如何将图形局部性增强器和图形压缩器有效地结合起来，使两者互惠互利。这些战略共同直接解决了GNN中长期存在的通信瓶颈问题，并释放了它们产生社会效益的潜力。此外，该项目旨在解决以下问题：局部性增强和数据压缩这两种最流行的通信优化方法的协同集成是否可以为一般图形问题提供开创性的解决方案。该奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的智力优势和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

The digital revolution has generated a vast volume of interconnected data, often represented as graphs, which is pertinent to numerous critical real-world applications. This has led to the increasing prevalence of Graph Neural Networks (GNNs), a technique that extends the benefits of Artificial Intelligence (AI) to graph-based applications. GNNs hold promising potential to significantly impact society, from accelerating drug discovery and preventing supply chain disruptions, to averting cascading power grid failures and identifying misinformation on social media. However, the actualization of such potential is currently impeded by computational inefficiencies caused by the colossal size and intricate nature (such as extreme sparsity and irregularity) of graphs, which pose challenges to the practical deployment of GNNs. This project aims to bridge the gap between the computational efficiency required for GNNs and their current performance, primarily due to the uniquely heavy load of communication required in GNN computation. In addition, the project enriches the educational experience of undergraduate and graduate students in the US by enhancing the quality of AI and system-related courses and outreach activities at the University of Rochester and Indiana University. Successful completion of this research project can unlock the immense potential of GNNs to solve problems in fields of medicine, public infrastructure, and economic development, among many other issues critical to the well-functioning of the republic and the prosperity of its economy. This project aims to develop a revolutionary communication reduction method that organically integrates on-the-fly versatile graph locality enhancement and high-ratio compression through software-hardware co-design. The research is structured around three primary thrusts: (1) The development of an on-the-fly graph locality enhancer via hardware-software co-design, providing significant versatility and additional reductions in communication demands compared to current leading methods. (2) The creation of an efficient lossy compressor that enables high-ratio, error-bounded compression and decompression for graph data, including both graph embedding and topology information. (3) The investigation into methods for effectively combining the graph locality enhancer and graph compressor, allowing them to mutually benefit each other. These strategies together directly address the persistent communication bottlenecks in GNNs and unleash their potential for societal benefits. Moreover, this project aims to resolve the following query: whether a collaborative integration of locality enhancement and data compression, the two most prevalent communication optimization approaches, can provide a ground-breaking solution to general graph problems.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.