ReRAM-based graph attention network with node-centric edge searching and hamming similarity

Abstract

<p>The graph attention network (GAT) has demonstrated its advantages via local attention mechanism but suffered from low energy and latency efficiency when implemented on conventional von-Neumann hardware. This work proposes and experimentally demonstrates an algorithm-hardware co-designed GAT that runs efficiently and reliably in ReRAM-based hardware. The neighborhood information is retrieved from trained node embeddings stored on crossbars in a single time step, and attention is implemented by efficient hashing and hamming similarity for higher robustness. Our scaled simulation based on the experimentally-validated model shows only 0.9% accuracy loss with over 35,500x energy improvement on the Cora dataset compared with GPU, and 1.1% accuracy improvement with 2× energy improvement compared with state-of-the-art ReRAM-based GNN accelerator.<br></p>