# SPA-GCN: Efficient and Flexible GCN Accelerator with an Application for Graph Similarity Computation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2111.05936 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.05936/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 22 of its 80 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 10 Nov 2021.

## Builds on (most cited first, 22 of 22)

- [Semi-Supervised Classification with Graph Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1609.02907/) (2016)
- [Fast Graph Representation Learning with PyTorch Geometric](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.02428/) (2019)
- [Graph Convolutional Neural Networks for Web-Scale Recommender Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.01973/) (2018)
- [MoleculeNet: A Benchmark for Molecular Machine Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.00564/) (2017)
- [Convolutional Networks on Graphs for Learning Molecular Fingerprints](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1509.09292/) (2015)
- [T-GCN: A Temporal Graph ConvolutionalNetwork for Traffic Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.05320/) (2018)
- [EIE: Efficient Inference Engine on Compressed Deep Neural Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1602.01528/) (2016)
- [Graph Matching Networks for Learning the Similarity of Graph Structured Objects](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.12787/) (2019)
- [SCNN: An Accelerator for Compressed-sparse Convolutional Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1708.04485/) (2017)
- [Bit Fusion: Bit-Level Dynamically Composable Architecture for Accelerating Deep Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1712.01507/) (2017)
- [SimGNN: A Neural Network Approach to Fast Graph Similarity Computation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1808.05689/) (2018)
- [HyGCN: A GCN Accelerator with Hybrid Architecture](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.02514/) (2020)
- [CirCNN: Accelerating and Compressing Deep Neural Networks Using Block-CirculantWeight Matrices](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1708.08917/) (2017)
- [Learning-based Efficient Graph Similarity Computation via Multi-Scale Convolutional Set Matching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.04440/) (2018)
- [EnGN: A High-Throughput and Energy-Efficient Accelerator for Large Graph Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.00155/) (2019)
- [Alchemy: A Quantum Chemistry Dataset for Benchmarking AI Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.09427/) (2019)
- [GraphACT: Accelerating GCN Training on CPU-FPGA Heterogeneous Platforms](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.02498/) (2019)
- [Dual-side Sparse Tensor Core](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.09564/) (2021)
- [Multi-View Graph Neural Networks for Molecular Property Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.13607/) (2020)
- [Packing Sparse Convolutional Neural Networks for Efficient Systolic Array Implementations: Column Combining Under Joint Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.04770/) (2018)
- [Gunrock: A High-Performance Graph Processing Library on the GPU](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1501.05387/) (2015)
- [NXgraph: An Efficient Graph Processing System on a Single Machine](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1510.06916/) (2015)

## Abstract (arXiv)

While there have been many studies on hardware acceleration for deep learning on images, there has been a rather limited focus on accelerating deep learning applications involving graphs. The unique characteristics of graphs, such as the irregular memory access and dynamic parallelism, impose several challenges when the algorithm is mapped to a CPU or GPU. To address these challenges while exploiting all the available sparsity, we propose a flexible architecture called SPA-GCN for accelerating Graph Convolutional Networks (GCN), the core computation unit in deep learning algorithms on graphs. The architecture is specialized for dealing with many small graphs since the graph size has a significant impact on design considerations. In this context, we use SimGNN, a neural-network-based graph matching algorithm, as a case study to demonstrate the effectiveness of our architecture. The experimental results demonstrate that SPA-GCN can deliver a high speedup compared to a multi-core CPU implementation and a GPU implementation, showing the efficiency of our design.