Wednesday, August 13, 2014

Parallel Javascript

ParallelJS started its life as River Trail, a JavaScript language extension for Firefox by Intel. River Trail provides a new constructor, ParallelArray with iteration methods whose callbacks are executed concurrently.
ParallelJS brings the RiverTrail idea to normal arrays and has recently been included in Firefox Nightly. It adds three methods to arrays (binary data will eventually get those methods, too):

Array.prototype.mapPar()
Array.prototype.filterPar()
Array.prototype.reducePar()
These methods work like the traditional array methods map(), filter() and reduce(), but the order in which the elements are processed is undefined (with the non-par versions, you know exactly in which order they are processed). That enables concurrent execution of multiple instances of the callback. However, not all callbacks can be run concurrently. A callback must fulfill certain requirements:
It must not mutate shared data. It can freely change data that it has created, but can only read data from the outside world.
Many host (or “native”) objects can’t be used. That includes the DOM, which may never be supported and regular expressions for which short- to mid-term support is likely. All vanilla JavaScript objects are fine, though.
PJS code is executed like this: It is first run sequentially and observed. The requirements for parallelism are checked. If they are fulfilled, parallel code is produced and run in parallel. If any of the requirements are not fulfilled anymore, then PJS reverts to sequential execution.
The rules for when PJS code can be run concurrently will probably never be standardized, because a PJS standard needs to accomodate a variety of implementation approaches (see below). There will, however, be guidelines and recommendations for what works for most implementations.

Given how difficult it is to predict whether your code can be run concurrently or not, an important part of PJS will be diagnostic tools. They will let you find out when and why code is not parallelizable.

ParallelJS is currently tentatively scheduled for ECMAScript 8. If you are worried that that’s too far into the future: ECMAScript 7 and ECMAScript 8 will be smaller and developed more quickly than ECMAScript 6. 

http://www.2ality.com/2013/12/paralleljs.html

Also checkout Webcl for the work there on Parallel Computing in HTML 5 Browsers.
https://www.khronos.org/webcl/