Adding Leo to the thread. Leo works down the hall from me. Adam On Fri, Jul 31, 2009 at 11:59 AM, Alex Russell<slightlyoff@chromium.org> wrote:
After a discussion this morning about the potential for parallel CSS layout with Erik Aarvidson, he pointed out a group at Berkeley doing research in this area:
http://www.eecs.berkeley.edu/~lmeyerov/projects/pbrowser/
The bits that jumped out to me were:
* the source is available [0] * they've implemented an abstract language for describing the CSS spec for parameterizing layout. It reminds me a lot of the work Badros did circa 2000 [1]. They suggest that this model does layout of the CSS 2.1 spec in time similar to the hand-tuned sequential engine in Gecko [2] * using Cilk++ to handle low-level paralleism, they've seen significant speedups beyond that for multi-core [2]
It's exciting to me to see this kind of parallelism being extracted from CSS layout operations, which have shown up in profiling of Google apps as a serious bottleneck. I hesitate to ask about the WebKit community's interest in this since I assume that if patches show up and can prove their value, they'll be accepted, but I would like to know where people are either supportive or skeptical about such an approach.
Regards
[0]: http://code.google.com/p/pbrowser/source/browse/#svn/trunk [1]: http://www.badros.com/greg/papers/gjbadros-dissertation.pdf [2]: http://www.eecs.berkeley.edu/~lmeyerov/projects/pbrowser/retreatwinter2009/p... , slide #19 _______________________________________________ webkit-dev mailing list webkit-dev@lists.webkit.org http://lists.webkit.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/webkit-dev