Scalability Analysis of Distributed Kolmogorov-Arnold Network Training on High-Performance Computing Systems

📅 2026-09-07
📈 Citations: 0
Influential: 0
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🤖 AI Summary
研究通过在高性能计算系统上使用分布式Kolmogorov-Arnold网络训练,探讨了其可扩展性问题,采用多节点多GPU设置进行实验分析。
📝 Abstract
Kolmogorov-Arnold Networks (KANs) replace the fixed activation functions and linear weights of Multi-Layer Perceptrons (MLPs) with learnable univariate functions on network edges, offering improved interpretability and, in some settings, competitive parameter efficiency. While the approximation properties of KANs have received considerable attention, their behavior under distributed, multi-GPU training has not been systematically characterized. This paper presents an empirical scalability study of data-parallel KAN training on multi-node, multi-GPU high-performance computing (HPC) infrastructure, evaluated along four dimensions: strong scaling, weak scaling, communication overhead, and model-size scaling. Experiments were conducted on the FinisTerrae III supercomputer using up to 8 NVIDIA A100 GPUs across 4 nodes with PyTorch Distributed Data Parallel (DDP). KAN training reaches 74.7% parallel efficiency at 8 GPUs with a 5.97x speedup, consistent with conventional deep learning workloads. Weak scaling shows an initial single-to-multi-GPU throughput drop followed by strong stability. Communication overhead follows a non-monotonic pattern (1.3%-6.1%), driven primarily by All-Reduce algorithm selection and inter-node latency rather than KAN's edge-wise gradient structure. The parameter-to-memory ratio improves with model size even as training time scales unfavorably. These results indicate that operator-level and data-parallel optimizations for KAN are complementary. We provide deployment guidelines for GPU topology and model-size selection, and discuss the limitations of a synthetic-regression evaluation.
Problem

Research questions and friction points this paper is trying to address.

Scalability
Distributed Training
High-Performance Computing
Kolmogorov-Arnold Networks
Multi-GPU
Innovation

Methods, ideas, or system contributions that make the work stand out.

Distributed Training
High-Performance Computing (HPC)
Scalability Analysis
Kolmogorov-Arnold Networks (KANs)
Communication Overhead
G
Guangneng Chen
University of Santiago de Compostela, 15782 Santiago de Compostela, Spain
D
David Garcia Selfa
Galicia Supercomputing Center (CESGA), 15705 Santiago de Compostela, Spain
P
Pablo Quesada Barriuso
University of Santiago de Compostela, 15782 Santiago de Compostela, Spain