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Are web applications ready for parallelism?

Published:24 January 2015Publication History
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Abstract

In recent years, web applications have become pervasive. Their backbone is JavaScript, the only programming language supported by all major web browsers. Most browsers run on desktop or mobile devices with parallel hardware. However, JavaScript is by design sequential, and current web applications make little use of hardware parallelism. Are web applications ready to exploit parallel hardware? We answer the question in two steps: First, we survey 174 web developers about the potential and challenges of using parallelism. Then, we study the performance and computation shape of a set of web applications that are representative for the emerging web. Our findings indicate that emerging web applications do have latent data parallelism, and JavaScript developers' programming style is not a significant impediment to exploiting this parallelism.

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          • Published in

            cover image ACM SIGPLAN Notices
            ACM SIGPLAN Notices  Volume 50, Issue 8
            PPoPP '15
            August 2015
            290 pages
            ISSN:0362-1340
            EISSN:1558-1160
            DOI:10.1145/2858788
            • Editor:
            • Andy Gill
            Issue’s Table of Contents
            • cover image ACM Conferences
              PPoPP 2015: Proceedings of the 20th ACM SIGPLAN Symposium on Principles and Practice of Parallel Programming
              January 2015
              290 pages
              ISBN:9781450332057
              DOI:10.1145/2688500

            Copyright © 2015 Owner/Author

            Publisher

            Association for Computing Machinery

            New York, NY, United States

            Publication History

            • Published: 24 January 2015

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