[webkit-dev] Is there a plan for supporting multi-process and WebCL in webkit

[Thibault Imbert]

Hi Oneal,

Yes, leveraging multicore and the power of GPUs for general computations is great and very powerful but first, securing such kernels is hard, and authoring these would be pretty brutal to most web developers, I think this is what Benjamin was referring to.

With WebCL, you are basically writing C style kernels that you load and run to drive the computations, initiatives like RiverTrail are more restrictive but way more approachable and closer to the web, exposing higher level primitives on top of WebCL (ParallelArray for example) and integrated at the language level, which makes a lot of sense.

You can also rely on Web Workers which are now broadly available, also abstracted through libraries like Parallel.js. You won't get shared memory, but improving data passing performance between workers may be a more interesting problem to solve in the short term, with lots of value to most developers.

Thibault

From: Oneal Bluce <onealbluce at yahoo.com<mailto:onealbluce at yahoo.com>>
Reply-To: Oneal Bluce <onealbluce at yahoo.com<mailto:onealbluce at yahoo.com>>
Date: Tuesday, April 9, 2013 8:39 PM
To: Benjamin Poulain <benjamin at webkit.org<mailto:benjamin at webkit.org>>
Cc: "webkit-dev at lists.webkit.org<mailto:webkit-dev at lists.webkit.org>" <webkit-dev at lists.webkit.org<mailto:webkit-dev at lists.webkit.org>>
Subject: Re: [webkit-dev] Is there a plan for supporting multi-process and WebCL in webkit

Hi, Benjamin
        if browser have a capability to run some application with data-intensive parallel computing . some applications required data-intensive parallel computing can works on websit.

       such as 3D movie,  3D game... etc, this can give developer a way that developer don't care which devices the application will run, this can
shorten the application development sycle, speedup the application deployment and reduce costs.

maybe the browser will to be a runtime container which can provide a rumtime for those applications that have run on various OS.

Cheers,
Oneal
From: Benjamin Poulain <benjamin at webkit.org<mailto:benjamin at webkit.org>>
To: Oneal Bluce <onealbluce at yahoo.com<mailto:onealbluce at yahoo.com>>
Cc: "webkit-dev at lists.webkit.org<mailto:webkit-dev at lists.webkit.org>" <webkit-dev at lists.webkit.org<mailto:webkit-dev at lists.webkit.org>>
Sent: Wednesday, April 10, 2013 1:47 AM
Subject: Re: [webkit-dev] Is there a plan for supporting multi-process and WebCL in webkit

Hi Oneal,


On Tue, Apr 9, 2013 at 2:40 AM, Oneal Bluce <onealbluce at yahoo.com<mailto:onealbluce at yahoo.com>> wrote:
Hello, I'm a researcher and I just focusing on the multi-process supporting and WebCL supporting in browser engin. so I have some concerns about the both features.
In recently, Google has pronounced that they will support the multi-process in their browser egin(Blink) which is forked from the webkit. but Google will not supporting the WebCL in Blink.  so I just want to know is there a plan supporting the multi-process and WebCL in webkit.

I am very curious about the source of interest in OpenCL on browser. While OpenCL is a great technology, I have the feeling it is not ready for the web.
What kind of applications do you foresee being powered by OpenCL on the Web?

I can imagine some use of CPU based kernels for the web (for image manipulation for example). But I have a hard time seeing how adding full support of OpenCL would not be shooting ourself in the foot at this point. That may change in the future when GPU hardware converges...

Cheers,
Benjamin


-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.webkit.org/pipermail/webkit-dev/attachments/20130410/89cf6c76/attachment.html>