Performance Benchmarks

Integrated Benchmarks

DGL continuously evaluates the speed of its core APIs, kernels as well as the training speed of the state-of-the-art GNN models. The benchmark code is available at the main repository. They are triggered for every nightly-built version and the results are published to https://asv.dgl.ai/.

v0.6 Benchmarks

To understand the performance gain of DGL v0.6, we re-evaluated it on the v0.5 benchmarks plus some new ones for graph classification tasks against the updated baselines. The results are available in a standalone repository.

v0.5 Benchmarks

Check out our paper Deep Graph Library: A Graph-Centric, Highly-Performant Package for Graph Neural Networks.

v0.4.3 Benchmarks

Microbenchmark on speed and memory usage: While leaving tensor and autograd functions to backend frameworks (e.g. PyTorch, MXNet, and TensorFlow), DGL aggressively optimizes storage and computation with its own kernels. Here’s a comparison to another popular package – PyTorch Geometric (PyG). The short story is that raw speed is similar, but DGL has much better memory management.

Dataset

Model

Accuracy

Time

Memory

PyG

DGL

PyG

DGL

Cora

GCN

81.31 Β± 0.88

0.478

0.666

1.1

1.1

GAT

83.98 Β± 0.52

1.608

1.399

1.2

1.1

CiteSeer

GCN

70.98 Β± 0.68

0.490

0.674

1.1

1.1

GAT

69.96 Β± 0.53

1.606

1.399

1.3

1.1

PubMed

GCN

79.00 Β± 0.41

0.491

0.690

1.1

1.1

GAT

77.65 Β± 0.32

1.946

1.393

1.6

1.1

Reddit

GCN

93.46 Β± 0.06

OOM

28.6

OOM

11.7

Reddit-S

GCN

N/A

29.12

9.44

15.7

3.6

Table: Training time(in seconds) for 200 epochs and memory consumption(GB)

Here is another comparison of DGL on TensorFlow backend with other TF-based GNN tools (training time in seconds for one epoch):

Dateset

Model

DGL

GraphNet

tf_geometric

Core

GCN

0.0148

0.0152

0.0192

Reddit

GCN

0.1095

OOM

OOM

PubMed

GCN

0.0156

0.0553

0.0185

PPI

GCN

0.09

0.16

0.21

Cora

GAT

0.0442

n/a

0.058

PPI

GAT

0.398

n/a

0.752

High memory utilization allows DGL to push the limit of single-GPU performance, as seen in below images.

http://data.dgl.ai/asset/image/DGLvsPyG-time1.png http://data.dgl.ai/asset/image/DGLvsPyG-time2.png

Scalability: DGL has fully leveraged multiple GPUs in both one machine and clusters for increasing training speed, and has better performance than alternatives, as seen in below images.

http://data.dgl.ai/asset/image/one-four-GPUs.png http://data.dgl.ai/asset/image/one-four-GPUs-DGLvsGraphVite.png http://data.dgl.ai/asset/image/one-fourMachines.png

Further reading: Detailed comparison of DGL and other alternatives can be found [here](https://arxiv.org/abs/1909.01315).