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Mozilla Jetpack contest winner harnesses GPU power to process data
Mozilla Labs has announced a winner of the Jetpack .5 contest. While Jetpack is known primarily as a framework for allowing coders with a web development background to put together add-on type enhancements for Firefox, the winner 's project wasn't your run-of-the-mill sidebar hack.
Alex Miltsev's submission was jetpack-to-CUDA, and it provides Jetpack developers with a simple way to offload intense processing tasks to GPUs. CUDA (demo video above) is NVidia's parallel computing architecture - and with CUDA-capable chips in more than 100 million PCs, Miltsev's handiwork could enable some seriously cool (and powerful) Jetpack add-ons to be developed.
The runners up (not to take anything away from them) were much more standard Jetpack offerings - a Google Translate extension, link shortener and sharer, and Twitter client.
Kudos to Miltssev for his creative entry! Here's hoping we see some truly awesome things in future versions of Firefox and Jetpack as a result.
Alex Miltsev's submission was jetpack-to-CUDA, and it provides Jetpack developers with a simple way to offload intense processing tasks to GPUs. CUDA (demo video above) is NVidia's parallel computing architecture - and with CUDA-capable chips in more than 100 million PCs, Miltsev's handiwork could enable some seriously cool (and powerful) Jetpack add-ons to be developed.
The runners up (not to take anything away from them) were much more standard Jetpack offerings - a Google Translate extension, link shortener and sharer, and Twitter client.
Kudos to Miltssev for his creative entry! Here's hoping we see some truly awesome things in future versions of Firefox and Jetpack as a result.
Comments
6
Subscribe to commentskojo87Nov 6th 2009 7:14PM
thats pretty nifty. i would really like to be able to harness my GPU power for things like video conversion. unfortunately im running ATi GPUs so this doesn't help me...
adombomNov 6th 2009 9:21PM
Doesn't ATI have something similar to CUDA?
AyleNov 7th 2009 12:03AM
They do, it's called Stream but it's harder to code for it and that's why CUDA is more popular, though Mediashow Espresso support GPU encoding with ATI cards.
DarrenNov 7th 2009 12:05AM
Yes, ATI has its own GPGPU API, called Stream. Stream never took off, but there's a hardware-agnostic API emerging now called OpenCL. OpenCL is still immature (NVIDIA's drivers are still in beta I think, and ATI's probably still in alpha), but it will probably be the de facto standard once it gets stable. Until then, CUDA's what everyone's writing for.
Fred ThompsonNov 8th 2009 2:29AM
GPU for DirectX and OpenGL mosquito noise and grain removal would be nice. x264 encoding can get a help but not by that tremendously much.
NickNov 7th 2009 12:22PM
This might be interesting to implement OpenGL and OpenVG support for the Gecko engine like Opera did with the Vega rendering engine for Presto.