Comments on: JavaScript running on the GPU

By: sentry360

sentry360 — Mon, 01 Feb 2010 19:22:30 +0000

I think OpenCL if not yet… will be able to run on a wider spectrum of GPUs. Especially because NVIDIA is working on a OpenCL layer on top of CUDA, also besides articles like this… “Why Won’t ATI Support CUDA and PhysX?”
http://www.extremetech.com/article2/0,2845,2324555,00.asp
I think OpenCL will work as smaller GPUs like my phone’s (Nokia N900) Graphics Card… and this is precisely the place where I would love some JavaScript acceleration.
Ideally what I envision… though have no clue how feasible it is… is FireFox mobile having some kind of an accelerator layer above their JS engine… that could take various JavaScript threads (especially the calculation intensive ones) and throw them into an OpenCL app that runs the calculations on the GPU and returns a value back to the CPU… I imagine this could take a load off the 600mhz CPU and make for a much smoother web browsing experience. As more and more cellphones are adding simple graphic chips to speed up the GUI, Games, Video… it would be nice to speed up the cellphone web browser these technologies.

By: sanya

sanya — Wed, 27 Jan 2010 20:40:35 +0000

mdmadph,
what advantages of using OpenCL instead of CUDA do you see? I had more experience in CUDA than in OpenCL.
Alex

By: sanya

sanya — Wed, 27 Jan 2010 20:35:02 +0000

sos,
I’m not sure about GPGPU on webOS. I read only about plans. Do you have information? The idea of webkit GPU acceleration on webOS is excellent from my point of view.

Alex

By: sanya

sanya — Wed, 27 Jan 2010 20:15:28 +0000

pelechati,
you could find my contact information in my CV: http://malexander.wordpress.com/2009/11/16/cirriculum-vitae/

By: mdmadph

mdmadph — Wed, 27 Jan 2010 15:43:54 +0000

I don’t all the in’s-and-out’s, I must admit, but wouldn’t it make more sense to use OpenCL instead of CUDA?

By: sos

sos — Wed, 27 Jan 2010 10:01:44 +0000

Hi Alex,

webOS is the operating system that runs on the Palm Pre & Pixi smartphones. Ben and Dion who run this blog are the tech leads of that project. All applications in webOS run in a webkit browser, and the phone has a very powerful GPU, but it is not accessible from the browser.

Bridging the gap between the browser and the GPU could be a massive gain for webOS.

By: pelechati

pelechati — Wed, 27 Jan 2010 08:37:05 +0000

Anyone have Alex’s contact information? I’d love to talk to him further about JS.

http://www.apture.com <–one of the most impressive javascript applications currently available.

By: sanya

sanya — Wed, 27 Jan 2010 07:42:55 +0000

joshmarinacci,

CUDA environment installation is required. Additional integration with browser is still needed. In Jetpack-to-CUDA project additional C++ code was written to extend jetpack.storage to make it possible to transpose on GPU. Answers to your question?

Regards

By: sanya

sanya — Wed, 27 Jan 2010 07:38:14 +0000

eyelidlessness,

bull’s eye :)! This is code misprint. Originally (you can see sourse on groups.google) the jetpack.storage was extended with transpose method. Then for the article it was renamed to cuda-storage. And misprint was made. Thanks for noticing!

By the way, in the end of “Elevating Performance” there are few words about JS syntax extending. (I don’t mean hyphen objects call ;)) What do you think about new JS syntax features for parallelizing? For start it could be provided by Jetpack environment.

Regards

By: joshmarinacci

joshmarinacci — Wed, 27 Jan 2010 02:58:08 +0000

GPU in the browser. Nummers.

So does this mean we can install custom shaders to apply effects directly to the contents of the Canvas object, or does that require more integration with the browser?

By: eyelidlessness

eyelidlessness — Wed, 27 Jan 2010 02:24:06 +0000

sanya, Excluse me, not a syntax error; a reference error. But ECMA-262 syntax does not allow dot access to object members with hyphens (nor unquoted declaration of those members in object literal syntax; this would be a syntax error). jetpack.cuda-storage would try to subtract the variable storage from the member cuda of the object jetpack. Run from the Firebug console:

var jetpack = { 'cuda-storage': 'foo' };
jetpack.cuda-storage; // ReferenceError: storage is not defined

I don't really understand your answer to me. Jetpack, as I understand it, is a web technology (HTML/CSS/JS) API for extending Mozilla applications. The APIs target C++ classes (obviously), but that shouldn't change the syntax rules of Javascript—so there must be something else going on. I've found no evidence that Javascript in Jetpack has different syntax rules than Javascript in other Mozilla technologies. Can you please clarify?

By: sanya

sanya — Wed, 27 Jan 2010 00:35:10 +0000

Hi!

To eyelidlessness:

“Isn’t this a syntax error? jetpack.cuda-storage”

jetpack.cuda-storage isn’t syntax error. jetpack class is extended with C++.

To sos:

“Any chance of getting a webkit build with this into webOS any time soon?”

I’m not sure what do you exactly mean by “webOS”. Could you comment? It is Open Source movement. So if community needs it and it is possible to build then it will be! You may be interested in these articles: http://mozillalabs.com/blog/2010/01/the-future-of-add-ons/ and http://mozillalabs.com/blog/2010/01/elevating-javascript-performance-through-gpu-power/ .

Regards,
Alex Miltsev
http://malexander.wordpress.com/

By: sos

sos — Tue, 26 Jan 2010 22:23:06 +0000

Any chance of getting a webkit build with this into webOS any time soon?

By: Jadet

Jadet — Tue, 26 Jan 2010 20:53:16 +0000

Yeah that’ll tell you storage is undefined, should be jetpack['cuda-storage']

By: eyelidlessness

eyelidlessness — Tue, 26 Jan 2010 18:57:03 +0000

Isn’t this a syntax error?

jetpack.cuda-storage