A Survey on Graph Neural Network Acceleration: Algorithms, Systems, and Customized Hardware

Graph neural networks (GNNs) are emerging for machine learning research on graph-structured data. GNNs achieve state-of-the-art performance on many tasks, but they face scalability challenges when it comes to real-world applications that have numerous data and strict latency requirements. Many studies have been conducted on how to accelerate GNNs in an effort to address these challenges. These acceleration techniques touch on various aspects of the GNN pipeline, from smart training and inference algorithms to efficient systems and customized hardware. As the amount of research on GNN acceleration has grown rapidly, there lacks a systematic treatment to provide a unified view and address the complexity of relevant works. In this survey, we provide a taxonomy of GNN acceleration, review the existing approaches, and suggest future research directions. Our taxonomic treatment of GNN acceleration connects the existing works and sets the stage for further development in this area.

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Publication Details

Journal
ACM Computing Surveys
Published
2026-03-27
DOI
https://doi.org/10.1145/3805796
Primary Topic
Advanced Graph Neural Networks
Type
article
Field-Weighted Citation Impact
0.00
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article

A Survey on Graph Neural Network Acceleration: Algorithms, Systems, and Customized Hardware

Yewen Wang, Yingyan Lin, Yizhou Sun, Atefeh Sohrabizadeh et al.
ACM Computing Surveys
Advanced Graph Neural Networks
article

A Survey on Graph Neural Network Acceleration: Algorithms, Systems, and Customized Hardware

Yewen Wang, Yingyan Lin, Yizhou Sun, Atefeh Sohrabizadeh, Cheng Wan, Zijie Huang, Shichang Zhang, Jason Cong, Ziniu Hu
article en

Abstract

Graph neural networks (GNNs) are emerging for machine learning research on graph-structured data. GNNs achieve state-of-the-art performance on many tasks, but they face scalability challenges when it comes to real-world applications that have numerous data and strict latency requirements. Many studies have been conducted on how to accelerate GNNs in an effort to address these challenges. These acceleration techniques touch on various aspects of the GNN pipeline, from smart training and inference algorithms to efficient systems and customized hardware. As the amount of research on GNN acceleration has grown rapidly, there lacks a systematic treatment to provide a unified view and address the complexity of relevant works. In this survey, we provide a taxonomy of GNN acceleration, review the existing approaches, and suggest future research directions. Our taxonomic treatment of GNN acceleration connects the existing works and sets the stage for further development in this area.

ACM Computing Surveys
Georgia Institute of Technology (US), University of California, Los Angeles (US), Harvard University Press (US)
Industry, innovation and infrastructure
Openalex Percentile: Top 5%
Advanced Graph Neural Networks
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