[webkit-dev] parallel layout research

[Adam Barth]

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 at 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/playout.pdf
> , slide #19
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