A Survey on Graph Neural Network Acceleration: Algorithms, Systems, and Customized Hardware
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.
Fields of Study & Subjects
Advanced Graph Neural Networks
Graph Theory and Algorithms
Advanced Data and IoT Technologies
Publication details
- Journal / source
- ACM Computing Surveys
- Publisher
- Association for Computing Machinery (ACM)
- Volume
- 58
- Issue
- 11
- Pages
- 1–36
- Publication date
- 27 March 2026
- Language
- EN