Environment and Feature Detection

A warning, most of these extensions may have extreme security issues currently, they are prototypes after all. Use a separate browser instance and profile for this series.

If you already have a working install of WebCL and River Trail, you can skip this part. Do not assume that you have them just because you have the latest version of your browser, because they are not available yet in any browser without a special build or extension.

Preparation

The first step is to install OpenCL drivers for all your devices.

If you are running OS X (Snow Leopard or Lion) then all OpenCL drivers are already installed and you’re good to go.

If you are running Linux or Windows, then you might need to install some OpenCL drivers. If your CPU is supported by both the AMD and Intel SDKs then I recommend you to install both.

If you have an nVidia or AMD graphics card, you probably already have OpenCL drivers installed for them (they are included in the graphics drivers), but you should make sure they are the latest version.

Now we’re onto a few semi-optional tools that you probably want, but can avoid them if you want to,

Git is my version control system of choice, and you will probably want to check out the repositories of examples and on Github.

Coffeescript is a thin wrapper around Javascript that I happen to like, it has a bit more Pythonesque syntax and is really nice. A lot of the support libraries, and a few of the examples will be written in Coffeescript, and you might want to be able to recompile them.

Installing WebCL

Now we can start installing the WebCL prototypes.

If you are running Linux or Windows, then you need to first install a 32-bit version of Firefox 10 and make sure that you have installed Firebug into your new profile, then you can install the Nokia WebCL prototype.

If you are running OS X, then you need to install the Samsung WebCL prototype based on WebKit. It is a bit complicated since you need to compile it from scratch.

Just follow the included readme, after a while into the build, you might meet some compilation errors but they are easily fixable.

Installing River Trail

To allow River Trail code to be accelerated via OpenCL you need to install the River Trail extension.

On Windows or Linux it really does need the Intel OpenCL driver, the AMD OpenCL driver or the driver for your graphics card is not enough. But if your computer does not support the Intel OpenCL then you can still execute River Trail code using a normal Javascript engine.

On OS X, the built in OpenCL drivers are fine.

Detecting WebCL and River Trail

So, after installing all that, we need a simple way to check that it is working. The easiest way is to checkout https://github.com/JensNockert/tools-for-the-next-generation with git (or download an archive of the repository from Github).

Under “01 - Feature Detection” there are two html files, webcl.html and rivertrail.html that contain feature detection code. Try both to make sure that your setup works. If everything installed correctly, it will look something like this for River Trail,

And something like this for WebCL,

The code is not really that spectacular, but feel free to check out the source and see my horrible DOM manipulation code. (Hook me up with a pull request if you enjoy that kind of stuff)

About OpenCL

Make sure you have webcl.html open in a browser, and make a small note of the structure of the information.

The first level in the output, “Apple” in my screenshot is the OpenCL platform name and underneath all OpenCL devices corresponding to that platform (but a single piece of hardware can be devices under multiple platforms.)

In OpenCL there are two domains where code can execute, the host (in WebCL this is the browser) or on a device which is connected to a host. The code we run on the host we call the ‘Application’ and on the code on devices we call ‘Kernels’.

And as we will learn in future lessons, calling kernels is different from how we call normal functions from the host. Another important thing to note about kernels is that they are not written in Javascript but a high-performance variant of C.

Summary

To summarize on what you should install,

  • Browser capable of WebCL
  • Browser capable of accelerated River Trail

and make sure they work. The rest is mainly sugar that could help you reach that goal.

Notes

I will be using Firefox most of the time, but the example code that does not depend on a specific feature should be portable to most major platforms (Firefox, Chrome, Safari and Opera.)

Any specific feature dependencies will be noted in the corresponding article (and please point it out in the comments if it is not.)

Edits

  1. Updated for Firefox 10

Tools for the next generation of Web Applications: Introduction

I do not know how the web will evolve in the future, I don’t think that anybody knows how the web of 2020 will look like, or what applications will be popular then.

But regardless of the direction the web evolves, we will undoubtedly see more and more complex client-side applications being developed. And a lot of the applications that were traditionally native applications will probably migrate to the browser within this time frame.

The migrating applications might include everything from games to large simulations to image and video editing, and everything inbetween. Your imagination is hopefully the only limit to what you will be able to achieve.

Because betting on the web is one of the safest bets to take, it is simply the platform that is most accessible to people today, and the platform people care about the most.

The goal of this series of articles is to give you some insight into some techniques, frameworks and tools that might be useful to build this new generation of applications, or to allow you to improve your current applications.

The tools that I am most interested in are tools that enable a new class of applications that we earlier could not build in the browser without plugins, and we’ll primarily focus on the set of these are almost purely performance increasing.

For example,

  • Faster Javascript engines
  • Typed Arrays
  • SIMD Intrinsics
  • Workers
  • River Trail
  • WebCL
  • WebGL (for computing, not graphics)

But to understand these new tools of the web, we need to understand the native libraries and features that power them.

The faster Javascript engines of the future, typed arrays and any SIMD intrinsics are designed to accelerate each thread of your applications. And do so by allowing us to utilize each processing core in a better way, and program ‘closer to the metal’.

River Trail and WebCL utilizes OpenCL to allow a piece of code to run on multiple processor cores, and in the case of WebCL, allow your code to run on graphics cards and even specialist OpenCL accelerators right from your browser.

If you haven’t heard of OpenCL, it is a framework for heterogenous computing designed by Khronos (who are also maintaining the OpenGL standard), and allows you to execute kernels written in a high-performance variant of C on just about any processor around. OpenCL supports everything from large clusters down to small embedded systems.

Single-threaded

Currently there are two engines that I enjoy to code for: the new Spidermonkey with type inference introduced in Firefox 9 which is really nice, and the V8 / Crankshaft engine used in Chrome. But the Javascript engines of the future has a lot more in store for us, and all of them are already picking up steam.

For example, Mozilla is currently working on Ionmonkey. Ionmonkey is a new whole-method JIT for Spidermonkey that hopefully brings some significant speedup for many types of code (and especially the type of code that we are interested in). It isn’t ready yet, but we can already see some benchmarks here and follow how it develops.

Internet Explorer 9 introduced the new Chakra engine, which has some interesting features that will probably migrate to other engines. For example, it compiles code on a separate thread, allowing it to load code faster and start executing it quicker. And I am convinced that Internet Explorer 10 will introduce features that will allow Internet Explorer to defend its position as the most widely used browser.

One of these features that will be included in the next version of Internet Explorer (but is already supported in all other major browsers) is one of the most significant API developments in high-performance Javascript during the last few years: typed arrays. Typed arrays behave in most respects like regular Javascript arrays, but they have a fixed type and length. This on one hand gives Javascript programmers a nice way to interact with binary data and on the other hand gives the Javascript engines a lot more opportunities for optimization.

The Google Chrome team also introduced NaCl (Native Client) the last year, which is a reasonably interesting proposition from a performance standpoint, since it allows you to replace some of your Javascript with native code. It seems like you should be able to implement an OpenCL to NaCl compiler, which could be very interesting. Unfortunatly since it uses binaries instead of code, it is very hard to inspect the scripts, unlike in Javascript.

The two other browser vendors, Webkit (Apple and friends) and Opera recently shipped new browser engines, and support all the engine-level features that we currently expect, and are very likely to stay competitive in the future.

But there are a lot of other features that are in the planning stage. A pet feature of mine, for example, are SIMD intrinsics. SIMD (Single-Instruction Multiple-Data) is a method for improving computational throughput in modern processors by performing the same operation in parallel on multiple pieces of data.

These SIMD intrinsics are very simple functions that essentially map down to a few simple SIMD assembly instructions. The Javascript engine would be aware of how these functions work, and generate special optimizations for them.

This is mainly an optimization, but it would also allow us to write more easily readable code when manipulating ‘strange types’ in Javascript, for example, long (64-bit) integers.

While there are currently not even any proposals of how these SIMD intrinsics should behave, there is still a high probability that we will see something along those lines in a future revision of the Javascript language.

This leads us to more complex parallelization features that introduce more than one thread of execution.

Multi-threaded

Workers are currently the only way of executing Javascript in parallel that is widely supported in current browsers, but they are not really designed for the task. They are designed to allow for background tasks, but are not really suitable for computation on their own.

But make sure that you do not forget about them, because they are a good fallback and can be a force multiplier when combined with more advanced features.

River Trail utilizes OpenCL to execute Javascript kernels on a multi-core CPU using a friendly API. I am quite convinced that it will be a popular choice in the future.

The most compelling feature of River Trail is that it is tightly integrated with the browser, and therefore allows for a lot more optimization than WebCL (or OpenCL) allows. Don’t be surprised if a future River Trail implementation outpaces WebCL significantly on short kernels where OpenCL imposes a too high communication overhead.

Another interesting thing is that River Trail can be combined with a lot of other performance increasing features in Javascript, for example SIMD intrinsics, which (like the SIMD features in OpenCL) could significantly increase performance and readability for certain kernels.

WebCL is essentially the big brother of River Trail, exposing the full OpenCL API to the web programmer, and allows you to use unmodified OpenCL kernels in your application. It is essentially the more flexible version of River Trail, and is designed to allow you to use any OpenCL accelerator in the system, including graphics processors and so on.

WebCL is also the API that we will be using the most throughout this series, mainly since the compilers are mature, and it is also the language and framework that I am most familiar with.

But River Trail has some interesting opportunities that we won’t see in WebCL since could be tighter integrated into the browser at a future point. For example could an implementation of River Trail significantly reduce the communication overhead required to run kernels on the CPU, which is currently quite significant in OpenCL.

WebCL currently has the advantage that the infrastructure is a bit more mature on the kernel side, on the Javascript side both technologies are noticably not ready.

WebGL on the other hand has the advantage that it is reasonably mature, and allows execution on just about every graphics card available.

But I generally wouldn’t recommend using it for computation though unless you have very specific requirements, since even the simplest tasks can easily turn extremely complex unless you’re very good at GLSL and WebGL. It is simply not designed for computation, only graphics.

Conclusion

There are many tools and frameworks already available in a pre-release form for us to play with, and the best way to get used to them is to actually use them. Just be be aware of the changing and non-final nature and use this time to your advantage, most developers won’t start using these tools until they are almost ready, and by then it is to late to influence their growth.

In addition to tools that ‘merely’ grant us faster performance, we have a lot of tools that simply allow us to do a lot of things that we could not do before, but those are interesting enough to get their own introductions when we meet them later in the series.

The next episode will be a shorter one, and contain instructions on how to set up our development environment on Windows or Linux. For example, installing different OpenCL drivers, WebCL plugins and River Trail.

Notes

There are currently at least three different implementations of WebCL,