FaaSBoard: Efficient Graph Processing with a Disaggregated Architecture on Serverless Services

Graph processing workloads are increasingly being migrated to the cloud. With the growing adoption of serverless computing, graph processing gains advantages such as cost-effectiveness and resource elasticity. However, existing graph processing systems with monolithic function architecture struggle to detect intra-job resource elasticity and suffer from significant communication overhead. In this paper, we present FaaSBoard, a graph processing system with a disaggregated serverless architecture powered entirely by serverless cloud services. FaaSBoard features a multi-tier data communication mechanism and an autonomous-elastic computing mechanism. Specifically, these two mechanisms are realized through image-based graph loading for faster starts, proxy-based collective communication leveraging high-bandwidth shared memory, 2D balanced graph partitioning for improved load balance, and a proactive terminate-and-respawn mechanism enabling fine-grained elasticity. Together, these four techniques collectively enhance both resource and overall execution efficiency. Experimental results demonstrate that FaaSBoard delivers up to 3.8× higher compute performance and reduces monetary cost by up to 61.5% compared to FaaSGraph, the current state-of-the-art serverless-based graph processing system. The source code of FaaSBoard is publicly available athttps://github.com/SJTU-Liquid/FaaSBoard.

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Publication Details

Journal
Proceedings of the ACM on Management of Data
Published
2026-05-18
DOI
https://doi.org/10.1145/3802054
Primary Topic
Graph Theory and Algorithms
Type
article
Field-Weighted Citation Impact
0.00

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article

FaaSBoard: Efficient Graph Processing with a Disaggregated Architecture on Serverless Services

Weihao Cui, Yushi Liu, Li Z, Shuo Quan et al.
Proceedings of the ACM on Management of Data
Graph Theory and Algorithms
article

FaaSBoard: Efficient Graph Processing with a Disaggregated Architecture on Serverless Services

Weihao Cui, Yushi Liu, Li Z, Shuo Quan, Shixuan Sun, Sen Gao, L. Ruan, Minyi Guo, Jie Wu, Quan Chen, Yikang Ruan, Bingsheng He
article en

Abstract

Graph processing workloads are increasingly being migrated to the cloud. With the growing adoption of serverless computing, graph processing gains advantages such as cost-effectiveness and resource elasticity. However, existing graph processing systems with monolithic function architecture struggle to detect intra-job resource elasticity and suffer from significant communication overhead. In this paper, we present FaaSBoard, a graph processing system with a disaggregated serverless architecture powered entirely by serverless cloud services. FaaSBoard features a multi-tier data communication mechanism and an autonomous-elastic computing mechanism. Specifically, these two mechanisms are realized through image-based graph loading for faster starts, proxy-based collective communication leveraging high-bandwidth shared memory, 2D balanced graph partitioning for improved load balance, and a proactive terminate-and-respawn mechanism enabling fine-grained elasticity. Together, these four techniques collectively enhance both resource and overall execution efficiency. Experimental results demonstrate that FaaSBoard delivers up to 3.8× higher compute performance and reduces monetary cost by up to 61.5% compared to FaaSGraph, the current state-of-the-art serverless-based graph processing system. The source code of FaaSBoard is publicly available athttps://github.com/SJTU-Liquid/FaaSBoard.

Proceedings of the ACM on Management of DataVol. 4(3)
National University of Singapore (SG), Nanyang Technological University (SG), Shanghai Jiao Tong University (CN), China Telecom (China) (CN), China Telecom (CN)
National Natural Science Foundation of China
Decent work and economic growth
Openalex Percentile: Top 4%
Graph Theory and Algorithms
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