I understand how GNNs/GCNs aggregate an arbitrary number of nodes' information from the neighborhood of a target node in order to predict an attribute of that target node. What I don't understand is, when we predict this attribute to all nodes in a graph, is the graph processed as a whole somehow, or are we basically iterating the same GNN over all the nodes one-by-one.
Toy examples on the internet rarely involve larger graphs, so what I've seen is that they treat this like batches, and all nodes are processed together, concurrently, yet, not as a "whole". Given a larger graph (1000s of nodes), surely the GNN must be iterated over them, right? Which would mean, that we can scale GNNs to very large graphs too, as the size of the GNN layers wouldn't scale with the size of the graph, would it?