# iSpLib: A Library for Accelerating Graph Neural Networks using Auto-tuned Sparse Operations

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2403.14853 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.14853/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 9 of its 13 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 21 Mar 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 9 of 9)

- [Semi-Supervised Classification with Graph Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1609.02907/) (2016)
- [Inductive Representation Learning on Large Graphs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.02216/) (2017)
- [How Powerful are Graph Neural Networks?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.00826/) (2018)
- [Fast Graph Representation Learning with PyTorch Geometric](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.02428/) (2019)
- [Deep Graph Library: A Graph-Centric, Highly-Performant Package for Graph Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.01315/) (2019)
- [SparseTIR: Composable Abstractions for Sparse Compilation in Deep Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.04606/) (2022)
- [FeatGraph: A Flexible and Efficient Backend for Graph Neural Network Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.11359/) (2020)
- [FusedMM: A Unified SDDMM-SpMM Kernel for Graph Embedding and Graph Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.06391/) (2020)
- [Optimizing Sparse Matrix Multiplications for Graph Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.00352/) (2021)

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [SparseTransX: Efficient Training of Translation-Based Knowledge Graph Embeddings Using Sparse Matrix Operations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.16949/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Core computations in Graph Neural Network (GNN) training and inference are often mapped to sparse matrix operations such as sparse-dense matrix multiplication (SpMM). These sparse operations are harder to optimize by manual tuning because their performance depends significantly on the sparsity of input graphs, GNN models, and computing platforms. To address this challenge, we present iSpLib, a PyTorch-based C++ library equipped with auto-tuned sparse operations. iSpLib expedites GNN training with a cache-enabled backpropagation that stores intermediate matrices in local caches. The library offers a user-friendly Python plug-in that allows users to take advantage of our optimized PyTorch operations out-of-the-box for any existing linear algebra-based PyTorch implementation of popular GNNs (Graph Convolution Network, GraphSAGE, Graph Inference Network, etc.) with only two lines of additional code. We demonstrate that iSpLib obtains up to 27x overall training speedup compared to the equivalent PyTorch 2.1.0 and PyTorch Geometric 2.4.0 implementations on the CPU. Our library is publicly available at https://github.com/HipGraph/iSpLib (https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.10806511).