high performance computing on graphics processing units: hgpu.org

Mobile devices, such as smartphones and tablets, now run full feature browsers capable of handling rich media and web content. The emergence of HTML5 makes the browser an ever more attractive platform for application developers. In addition, improvements in JavaScript engines are further shrinking the performance gap between native applications, typically written in C and C++, and web apps, those written in web-based technologies (HTML, CSS and JavaScript). However there is still one area where native applications can show significantly better performance: compute-intensive functions, such as complex image and audio processing algorithms, are considered beyond the reach of JavaScript. This work looks at removing this last deficiency from the web application platform. Specifically we show how high-performance compute capabilities of multi-core CPUs and programmable GPUs can be made accessible to web applications and then discuss the standardization of this technology and its implementation for a mobile browser.