Heta: Distributed Training of Heterogeneous Graph Neural Networks

Heterogeneous Graphs (HetGs) that capture relationships among different types of nodes are ubiquitous in real-world applications such as academic networks and e-commerce. Although Heterogeneous Graph Neural Networks (HGNNs) have demonstrated superior performance in learning from these complex structures, distributed training of HGNNs on large-scale graphs with billions of edges faces substantial communication overhead. This challenge is exacerbated by heterogeneous characteristics such as varying feature dimensions across node types and featureless nodes requiring learnable parameters. Existing systems and communication reduction techniques designed for homogeneous graphs become suboptimal or even inapplicable for HetGs and HGNNs by overlooking both these heterogeneous characteristics and the inherent computational structure of HGNNs. We present Heta , a framework designed to address the communication bottleneck in distributed HGNN training. Heta leverages the key insight that HGNN aggregation is order-invariant and decomposable into relation-specific computations. Built on this insight, we introduce three key innovations: (1) a Relation-Aggregation-First (RAF) paradigm that conducts relation-specific aggregations within partitions and exchanges only partial aggregations across machines, proven to reduce communication complexity; (2) a meta-partitioning strategy that divides a HetG based on its graph schema and HGNN computation dependency while minimizing cross-partition communication and maintaining computation and storage balance; and (3) a heterogeneity-aware GPU cache system that accounts for varying miss-penalty ratios across node types. Through extensive evaluation of billion-edge heterogeneous graphs, we demonstrate that Heta achieves up to 5.3X and 4.4X speedup over state-of-the-art systems DGL and GraphLearn while maintaining model accuracy.