Re:Gpu.js – GPU Accelerated JavaScript
by dahart on Thursday February 28, 2019 @07:36PM
(#19276924)
I guess there's two different topics in there.
First, I agree completely that the web has insane amounts of bloat relative to the size of the content you request. Most people here would agree; frameworks and ads and analytics are crazy. This is true, but irrelevant to GPU.js.
Second, GPGPU applications numerous. There are several listed here in the comments and on the GPU.js site, e.g., ray tracing, matrix multiplication. A really obvious one for HN would be neural network traing and/or inference, or any other optimization technique. It's useful for physics sims, video editing, and image processing. Here's a longer list: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General-purpose_computing_on_g...
That's not to mention that it's just fun in the spirit of hacking to figure out how to use your systems in weird ways. The cool part about GPU.js is the GPU access with transparent CPU fallback - you get to write GPU-CPU agnostic code in javascript. It's neat that they implemented in javascript a way to cross compile javascript to a shader.
You're right that the power draw of a GPU isn't trivial, but the watts per megaflop is lower than CPU, for well-crafted highly parallel compute applications, even on mobile devices. I don't imagine using GPU.js on a phone, my personal assumption is that GPU.js is mostly meant for developers playing around on desktops right now. The benchmark specs on the GPU.js page describe a desktop system.
First, I agree completely that the web has insane amounts of bloat relative to the size of the content you request. Most people here would agree; frameworks and ads and analytics are crazy. This is true, but irrelevant to GPU.js.
Second, GPGPU applications numerous. There are several listed here in the comments and on the GPU.js site, e.g., ray tracing, matrix multiplication. A really obvious one for HN would be neural network traing and/or inference, or any other optimization technique. It's useful for physics sims, video editing, and image processing. Here's a longer list: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General-purpose_computing_on_g...
That's not to mention that it's just fun in the spirit of hacking to figure out how to use your systems in weird ways. The cool part about GPU.js is the GPU access with transparent CPU fallback - you get to write GPU-CPU agnostic code in javascript. It's neat that they implemented in javascript a way to cross compile javascript to a shader.
You're right that the power draw of a GPU isn't trivial, but the watts per megaflop is lower than CPU, for well-crafted highly parallel compute applications, even on mobile devices. I don't imagine using GPU.js on a phone, my personal assumption is that GPU.js is mostly meant for developers playing around on desktops right now. The benchmark specs on the GPU.js page describe a desktop system.