# Accelerating Storage-Based Training for Graph Neural Networks

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.01473 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.01473/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 26 of its 43 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 4 Jan 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 26 of 26)

- [Graph Attention Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.10903/) (2017)
- [Inductive Representation Learning on Large Graphs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.02216/) (2017)
- [A Comprehensive Survey on Graph Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.00596/) (2019)
- [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)
- [Link Prediction Based on Graph Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.09691/) (2018)
- [Deep Graph Library: A Graph-Centric, Highly-Performant Package for Graph Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.01315/) (2019)
- [AliGraph: A Comprehensive Graph Neural Network Platform](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.08730/) (2019)
- [DistDGL: Distributed Graph Neural Network Training for Billion-Scale Graphs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.05337/) (2020)
- [Meta-GNN: On Few-shot Node Classification in Graph Meta-learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.09718/) (2019)
- [Neo-GNNs: Neighborhood Overlap-aware Graph Neural Networks for Link Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.04216/) (2022)
- [PinnerSage: Multi-Modal User Embedding Framework for Recommendations at Pinterest](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.03634/) (2020)
- [Fi-GNN: Modeling Feature Interactions via Graph Neural Networks for CTR Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.05552/) (2019)
- [ConsisRec: Enhancing GNN for Social Recommendation via Consistent Neighbor Aggregation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.02254/) (2021)
- [Distributed Hybrid CPU and GPU training for Graph Neural Networks on Billion-Scale Graphs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.15345/) (2021)
- [IGB: Addressing The Gaps In Labeling, Features, Heterogeneity, and Size of Public Graph Datasets for Deep Learning Research](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.13522/) (2023)
- [PaGE-Link: Path-based Graph Neural Network Explanation for Heterogeneous Link Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.12465/) (2023)
- [Ginex: SSD-enabled Billion-scale Graph Neural Network Training on a Single Machine via Provably Optimal In-memory Caching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.09151/) (2022)
- [MariusGNN: Resource-Efficient Out-of-Core Training of Graph Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.02365/) (2022)
- [Detecting Communities from Heterogeneous Graphs: A Context Path-based Graph Neural Network Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.02058/) (2021)
- [Learning To Rank Resources with GNN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.07946/) (2023)
- [Accelerating Sampling and Aggregation Operations in GNN Frameworks with GPU Initiated Direct Storage Accesses](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.16384/) (2023)
- [FlashGraph: Processing Billion-Node Graphs on an Array of Commodity SSDs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1408.0500/) (2014)
- [SAGE: A Storage-Based Approach for Scalable and Efficient Sparse Generalized Matrix-Matrix Multiplication](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.13626/) (2023)
- [Helios: An Efficient Out-of-core GNN Training System on Terabyte-scale Graphs with In-memory Performance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.00837/) (2023)
- [Reducing Memory Contention and I/O Congestion for Disk-based GNN Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.13984/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Graph neural networks (GNNs) have achieved breakthroughs in various real-world downstream tasks due to their powerful expressiveness. As the scale of real-world graphs has been continuously growing, a storage-based approach to GNN training has been studied, which leverages external storage (e.g., NVMe SSDs) to handle such web-scale graphs on a single machine. Although such storage-based GNN training methods have shown promising potential in large-scale GNN training, we observed that they suffer from a severe bottleneck in data preparation since they overlook a critical challenge: how to handle a large number of small storage I/Os. To address the challenge, in this paper, we propose a novel storage-based GNN training framework, named AGNES, that employs a method of block-wise storage I/O processing to fully utilize the I/O bandwidth of high-performance storage devices. Moreover, to further enhance the efficiency of each storage I/O, AGNES employs a simple yet effective strategy, hyperbatch-based processing based on the characteristics of real-world graphs. Comprehensive experiments on five real-world graphs reveal that AGNES consistently outperforms four state-of-the-art methods, by up to 4.1X faster than the best competitor. Our code is available at https://github.com/Bigdasgit/agnes-kdd26.