DAHBM-GCN: A Flexible Graph Convolution Network Accelerator With Multiple Dataflows and HBM

Abstract

Graph-structured data has been widely applied in transportation, molecular, and e-commerce networks, etc. Graph Convolutional Network (GCN) has emerged as an efficient approach to processing non-Euclidean graph data. However, the varying sizes and sparsity of graph datasets, coupled with the dependency of the dataflow patterns in GCN computation on the graph data, have rendered the acceleration of GCN inference increasingly challenging. This paper proposes a GCN inference accelerator based on multi-dataflow and high bandwidth memory (HBM), named DAHBM-GCN. Firstly, we designed a computing engine that supports multiple dataflows, aggregation-first, and combination-first orders. Furthermore, an adaptive selector for the multi-dataflow computing engine based on the decision tree is proposed to select the optimal dataflow computing engine. Secondly, an efficient mapping of pseudo channels (PCs) for multi-channel HBM is devised to enhance bandwidth, effectively alleviating memory latency and bandwidth bottlenecks. Thirdly, a hybrid fixed-point quantization strategy for GCN is introduced, which reduces the GCN model’s computation complexity and parameter count with almost no loss of accuracy. Finally, extensive performance evaluation experiments demonstrate that across various datasets, DAHBM-GCN achieved average speedups of 52.5–129.3× and 4.9–7.9× compared to PyG-GCN and DGL-GCN on CPU, respectively. Compared to the AWB-GCN, HyGCN, HLS-GCN, and GCNAX accelerators FPGA-based, DAHBM-GCN also exhibits average speedups of 1.21-2.21×, 1.25-1.98×, 1.65-2.68×, and 1.18-1.56× respectively, on various datasets. Additionally, DAHBM-GCN possesses the advantages of high flexibility and low energy consumption.