Towards real-time applications in mobile web browsers

WebGL and WebCL are web targeted versions of OpenGL ES and OpenCL standards. Using these standards, it is possible to better exploit the hardware resources in embedded systems from web browsers allowing timely processing of audio, video, and graphics. WebGL excels in graphics applications while WebCL fares better when more flexibility is required in execution platform selection, load balancing, data formats, control flow, or memory access patterns. This paper explores the potential for mobile web application acceleration utilizing WebGL and particularly WebCL which is currently under intense development. Where driver support is lacking, WebGL is used as a proxy to provide an estimate of WebCL opportunity. Speedups in the order of 200x over JavaScript are demonstrated in best case situations for a GPU target. In similar situations, CPU acceleration can be 10x while running in a laptop browser. In addition, as building and optimizing a WebCL implementation is part of the reported work, an overview of the important development issues is given.