Sunday, January 20, 2013

Superconductor Language in Action: Easy Big Data Viz in Your Browser

Exciting news: we'll be talking about Superconductor at the O'Reilly Fluent conference! This will be the first time we show it outside of small seminars, and will hopefully coincide with our open source release. This video proposing our session gives a feel for what Superconductor can do. The link skips right into the demo:


The basic idea is that you write a normalish webpage (HTML5, JS, JSON, CSS) for including and manipulating your big data viz, except:
  1. Instead of relying up on the browser to run it (parse, layout, render, & animate), you load in our GPU-accelerated JavaScript libraries for the heavy lifting. Behind the scenes, we automatically exploit workers, WebCL, WebGL, etc. 
  2. Instead of using JavaScript for fancy layouts, you load in a widget made with our declarative layout DSL (or use it to define your own). Our parallel program synthesizer automatically finds the parallelism in the widget specs and our code generators output GPU code based on it. 
We're finally ramping up on a paper with the end-to-end system details; this will be the first time we discuss running inside of a commercial browser and using GPUs. Papers have a ridiculous delay period, so of you'll be at SIGGRAPH (LA), PPOPP (Shenzen, China), or Intel's TechFest (Portland), you'll be able to catch a demo before then.

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