Monday, January 28th, 2008
Berkeley Parallel Browser Project
How did we become interested in browsers? We realized that browsers must be parallel while brainstorming about the vision of the Berkeley Par Lab. We identified a few great “killer applications” enabled by many-core processors, but all of these applications were either already parallel or contained components that naturally could be implemented in parallel, such as machine learning. In these applications, the revolutionary role of upcoming manycores was to (i) fit these applications into smaller form factors (on a desktop rather than on a supercomputer) or (ii) make them to run in real time (rather than in batch mode).
Since all our killer applications appeared to be already parallel, we became curious whether the multicore revolution is going to have any impact at all on the sequential software (it has been widely speculated that we would have to start rewriting today’s sequential software into parallel). The web browser, predicted to be the new desktop, was the logical sequential application to examine.
Initially, it seemed that browsers currently run fast enough, and will do so even as web pages get richer. However, measuring today’s browsers on old laptops suggested that tomorrow’s pages will make today’s browsers run unacceptably slow (because neither processors nor browsers will become much faster, while page complexity will increase). Furthermore, Bell’s Law’s insistence that handhelds will soon play the role of laptops nailed it for us: given the CMOS roadmap, there was no way a sequential browser could run fast enough on a phone.
We have a long way to go, but a great goal. If we can build a parallel web browser, tomorrow’s handhelds could provide as rich an experience as today’s laptops.
Out in Cali again - seeing a talk on this today. Sounds interesting.
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