Jump to content

River Trail (JavaScript engine)

Edit links
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
This is an old revision of this page, as edited by User5910 (talk | contribs) at 05:42, 31 January 2014 (Pointed SSE and AVX wikilinks to their specific pages instead of the disambiguation page (thanks DPL bot!), also put AVX before SSE since AVX is more current.). The present address (URL) is a permanent link to this revision, which may differ significantly from the current revision.
Developer(s)Intel
Repository
Websitegithub.com/RiverTrail

River Trail (also known as Parallel Javascript) is an open source software engine designed by Intel for executing JavaScript code using parallel computing on multi-core processors.

River Trail was announced at the Intel Developer Forum in September 2011, and demonstrated using a Firefox extension developed by Intel. Brendan Eich, the original author of JavaScript, promised that he would promote River Trail within Ecma International, saying "The demo shows a 15x speedup over serial JavaScript. It lights up the ridiculously parallel hardware in modern CPUs and GPUs, for audio, video, image processing, automated voice response, computer vision, 3D gaming, etc. – all written in memory-safe, clean, functional JavaScript, without threads and their data races and deadlocks."[1] Because River Trail leverages Intel's OpenCL SDK[2] it can exploit multiple CPU cores as well as data parallel instructions (ex. AVX, SSE) and the speedup can be greater than the CPU core count would imply.

A native implementation of River Trail in Firefox's SpiderMonkey JavaScript engine was announced in September 2012[3] and was added to nightly Firefox builds in April 2013.[4]

Operation

To use the engine scripts uses a special API, based on three pillars: a type called ParallelArray, several methods of Prototype of ParallelArray, and elementary functions.[5]

References

  1. ^ Cade Metz (17 September 2011). "Intel extends JavaScript for parallel programming". The Register. Retrieved 2013-04-10.
  2. ^ Hillar, Gaston (29 September 2011). "Introducing Intel Labs' River Trail". Dr. Dobb's. Retrieved 29 January 2014.
  3. ^ Gareth Halfacree (13 September 2012). "Intel boosts JavaScript with River Trail release". bit-tech. Retrieved 2013-04-10.
  4. ^ "Bug 829602 - ParallelDo intrinsic and self-hosted ParallelArray". Mozilla Foundation. Retrieved 2013-04-10.
  5. ^ Three pillars of the API, retrieved 2011-09-14
Retrieved from "https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=River_Trail_(JavaScript_engine)&oldid=593234975"