• Using JavaScript and WebCL for...

Treffer: Using JavaScript and WebCL for numerical computations ; a comparative study of native and web technologies

Title:
Using JavaScript and WebCL for numerical computations ; a comparative study of native and web technologies
Authors:
Khan, Faiz, Foley-Bourgon, Vincent, Kathrotia, Sujay, Lavoie, Erick, Hendren, Laurie
Contributors:
Fonds de Recherche du Québec Nature et Technologies, Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada
Source:
ACM SIGPLAN Notices ; volume 50, issue 2, page 91-102 ; ISSN 0362-1340 1558-1160
Publisher Information:
Association for Computing Machinery (ACM)
Publication Year:
2014
Document Type:
Fachzeitschrift article in journal/newspaper
Language:
English
DOI:
10.1145/2775052.2661090
Availability:
https://doi.org/10.1145/2775052.2661090
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2775052.2661090
https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/2775052.2661090
Rights:
https://www.acm.org/publications/policies/copyright_policy#Background
Accession Number:
edsbas.4ACA92D7
Database:
BASE

Weitere Informationen

From its modest beginnings as a tool to validate forms, JavaScript is now an industrial-strength language used to power online applications such as spreadsheets, IDEs, image editors and even 3D games. Since all modern web browsers support JavaScript, it provides a medium that is both easy to distribute for developers and easy to access for users. This paper provides empirical data to answer the question: Is JavaScript fast enough for numerical computations? By measuring and comparing the runtime performance of benchmarks representative of a wide variety of scientific applications, we show that sequential JavaScript is within a factor of 2 of native code. Parallel code using WebCL shows speed improvements of up to 2.28 over JavaScript for the majority of the benchmarks.