O2WebCL: an automatic OpenCL-to-WebCL translator for high performance web computing

Abstract

HTML5 has become very attractive for cross-platform applications on software-side. Likewise, GPU has increased in popularity due to its energy efficiency of parallel execution on hardware-side. JavaScript, which performs dynamic operations of HTML5, is natively slow. To resolve the performance problem, web computing language (WebCL) can be utilized. WebCL operates by adapting open computing language (OpenCL) codes for web execution. Programming of WebCL code can be quite challenging, however, for both OpenCL and web programmers. In this paper, we propose an OpenCL-to-WebCL translator infrastructure, called O2WebCL. O2WebCL consists of a fully automated OpenCL-to-WebCL translator and O2WebCL library. The O2WebCL translator converts OpenCL codes into WebCL codes and O2WebCL application programming interfaces. The O2WebCL library operates as a bridge between the OpenCL and WebCL libraries. We resolved some implementation issues for the bridge such as type conversion and indirect addressing. We evaluated the performance of our work and found that we could achieve, on average, 75 % of the performance of the equivalent OpenCL execution.