{"id":34032,"date":"2011-09-15T22:51:31","date_gmt":"2011-09-15T20:51:31","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/?p=34032"},"modified":"2011-09-16T10:07:26","modified_gmt":"2011-09-16T08:07:26","slug":"multi-core-javascript-project-from-intel-now-downloadable","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/software\/34032-multi-core-javascript-project-from-intel-now-downloadable.html","title":{"rendered":"Multi-core JavaScript project from Intel now downloadable"},"content":{"rendered":"

Summary<\/span>: Intel has made its data parallel JavaScript extension for Firefox available for download which promises easy multi-core development for everyday programs, not just scientific applications<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

As part of its data parallel JavaScript project, Intel<\/a> today made RivertTrail available for download from Github<\/a>. Intel described RiverTrail as their parallel computing JavaScript project, which comes with a multi-core capable JavaScript Firefox extension.<\/p>\n

Justin Rattner<\/a>, Intel CTO and director of Intel Labs, made the announcement as part of his keynote address during Intel Developer Forum (IDF) 2011 held in San Francisco.<\/p>\n

Calling on stage Brendan Eich<\/a>, Mozilla<\/a> CTO and creator of JavaScript, Rattner set the scene by asking Eich about JavaScript\u2019s non-existent parallel processing capabilities.<\/p>\n

This lead into a demonstration of RiverTrail, which was shown to improve the performance of a particle physics simulator 15 fold from 3 frames per second (fps) to 45fps.<\/p>\n

\"Intel

Intel RiverTrail at IDF 2011<\/p><\/div>\n

At their parallel web applications booth at IDF, Intel Labs staff\u00a0Richard Hudson and Stephan Herhut showed a similar demonstration of the technology, with the notable addition of a resource monitor which showed the simulator maxing out all 8 cores of their demo machine.<\/p>\n

With the parallelism extension turned off only one core was used.<\/p>\n

Although the demonstration made use of a particle simulation, Intel\u00a0said that the aim of the project isn\u2019t only for scientific applications.<\/p>\n

\"Richard

Richard Hudson and Stephan Herhut - Intel Labs<\/p><\/div>\n

In an earlier conversation at their booth, Hudson explained that they made the technology easy enough for productivity programmers to use.<\/p>\n

The idea was to help developers avoid the complexities typically associated with programming for parallelism, such as locks and other tricks needed to prevent programs from behaving badly.<\/p>\n

This would enable developers to build new kinds of in-browser applications such photo and video editing programs or 3D games, Intel said.<\/p>\n

Since JavaScript is also predominantly a web technology, Hudson said that security was of paramount concern.<\/p>\n

He explained that they generate OpenCL code, which they use as a hardware abstraction layer, but ensured that they worked to offer all the same security inherent in JavaScript.<\/p>\n

\"Brendan

Brendan Eich - Mozilla CTO, Justin Rattner - Intel CTO<\/p><\/div>\n

In a video released today with the announcement, Herhut said that whenever they had to make a choice between performance and safety, they went for safety.<\/p>\n

On their use of OpenCL, Hudson explained that their principle is to \u201crun everywhere, but run best on Intel.\u201d<\/p>\n

During the keynote, Intel said that they would like to see their parallel JavaScript extension become part of the ECMAScript standard.<\/p>\n

Mozilla\u2019s Eich said that he sits on the ECMAScript standards body and promised to promote RiverTrail there.<\/p>\n

Jan Vermeulen is a guest of Intel at IDF 2011.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Intel’s RiverTrail, a parallel computing extension for JavaScript, can now be downloaded from Github <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":15,"featured_media":34044,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[18,16],"tags":[4824,35,4702,131,4826,975,4816,4818,4820,4822],"class_list":["post-34032","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-internet","category-software","tag-brendan-eich","tag-headline","tag-idf-2011","tag-intel","tag-justin-rattner","tag-mozilla","tag-parallel-javascript","tag-parallel-web-applications","tag-richard-hudson","tag-stephan-herhut"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34032"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/15"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=34032"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34032\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":34034,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34032\/revisions\/34034"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/34044"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=34032"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=34032"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=34032"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}