Understanding Reentrancy and Thread Safety in Depth
- May 10, 2021
- Liu, An-Chi 劉安齊
NCTU Observations and Reflections (4): Second Year (Fall)
- January 27, 2021
- Liu, An-Chi 劉安齊
Setting Up a CUDA Development Environment and a Simple Program Example
- December 10, 2020
- Liu, An-Chi 劉安齊
Achieving Lock-Free Programming with Compare-and-Swap
- October 28, 2020
- Liu, An-Chi 劉安齊
Converting Pthreads to JavaScript with Emscripten and Performance Analysis (2) — Merge Sort
- August 10, 2020
- Liu, An-Chi 劉安齊
Converting Pthreads to JavaScript with Emscripten and Performance Analysis
- July 7, 2020
- Liu, An-Chi 劉安齊
¶ Introduction
Emscripten is a tool that compiles C/C++ to WebAssembly. Under the hood it goes through LLVM. It supports compiling Pthreads: it turns them into JavaScript Web Workers plus WebAssembly. It can even translate OpenGL to WebGL, allowing programs to run in a browser with performance close to native.
The focus of this post is exactly that: converting Pthreads into Web Workers + WebAssembly. I will take an example program and try the conversion in practice. Finding a good benchmark program is not easy, so I wrote a small parallel Pthread program to compute π as the test case.
I will first walk through how to use Emscripten to convert Pthreads to JS. While following the official documentation, I ran into several pitfalls; I also record them here so you don’t fall into the same holes. Then I will compare performance for (1) native C code, (2) Emscripten-generated JS/WASM, and (3) a Web Worker implementation written directly in JavaScript.
Continue readingA Simple Pthreads Parallelization Example and Performance Analysis
- July 2, 2020
- Liu, An-Chi 劉安齊
Evaluation of Web Worker for Parallel Programming with Browsers, NodeJS and Deno
- June 26, 2020
- Liu, An-Chi 劉安齊
