

GPU accelerated computation (like CUDA/OpenCL) within the browser, using WebGL - babs474
http://learningwebgl.com/blog/?p=1828

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jacquesm
What's the rationale behind doing this ? GPGPU stuff is used for the most part
in pipelines of float intensive calculations, javascript is mostly used to
implement user interface functionality in interactive websites, I can see that
it is 'interesting' in an academic sort of way, just like the javascript based
key parallel key breaker was interesting but I can't see anybody that is
looking at production taking this as their preferred route to a solution.

Am I missing something ? Is there an application that would benefit from this
(seti at home is mentioned, but that is wired in tightly with using idle
cycles, information not generally available to the browser anyway, and it
would be at considerable overhead compared to the C/C++ approach).

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babs474
I can only guess about applications since this is pretty new, and only a proof
of concept. I doubt anyone has had a chance to consider this for any
production solution.

However, I think the possibilities could be pretty compelling for any
distributed computing project that can be gpu accelerated. What if all you had
to do to contribute to the seti at home project was to visit a webpage. No
client to install. If the algorithm is sufficiently implementable on the GPU
there would be little or no overhead compared to a C/C++ solution.

Historically javascript has been focused on user interfaces, but perhaps it
has been overlooked as a distributed computing platform.

