OpenGraphGym-MG: Using Reinforcement Learning to Solve Large Graph Optimization Problems on MultiGPU Systems

Large scale graph optimization problems arise in many fields. This paper presents an extensible, high performance framework (namedOpenGraphGym-MG) that uses deep reinforcement learning and graph embedding to solve large graph optimization problems with multiple GPUs. The paper uses a common RL algorithm (deep Q-learning) and a representative graph embedding (structure2vec) to demonstrate the extensibility of the framework and, most importantly, to illustrate the novel optimization techniques, such as spatial parallelism, graph-level and node-level batched processing, distributed sparse graph storage, efficient parallel RL training and inference algorithms, repeated gradient descent iterations, and adaptive multiple-node selections. This study performs a comprehensive performance analysis on parallel efficiency and memory cost that proves the parallel RL training and inference algorithms are efficient and highly scalable on a number of GPUs. This study also conducts a range of large graph experiments, with both generated graphs (over 30 million edges) and real-world graphs, using a single compute node (with six GPUs) of the Summit supercomputer. Good scalability in both RL training and inference is achieved: as the number of GPUs increases from one to six, the time of a single step of RL training and a single step of RL inference on large graphs with more than 30 million edges, is reduced from 316.4s to 54.5s, and 23.8s to 3.4s, respectively. The research results on a single node lay out a solid foundation for the future work to address graph optimization problems with a large number of GPUs across multiple nodes in the Summit.