Presentation: "River Trail: Adding Data Parallelism to JavaScript"

Time: Tuesday 14:00 - 15:00

Location: Robinson/Whitman

Abstract:
Parallel hardware is today's reality and language extensions that ease exploiting its promised performance flourish. For most mainstream languages, one or more tailored solutions exist that address the specific needs of the language to access parallel hardware. Yet, one widely used language is still stuck in the sequential past: JavaScript, the lingua franca of the web.

Solutions used in other languages do not transfer well to the world of JavaScript due to differences in programming models, the additional requirements of the web like safety and security, and developer expectations. To address this we created River Trail, a new parallel programming API designed specifically for JavaScript. This talk will describe River Trail and its vision of how to leverage current and future parallel hardware from within the browser and JavaScript.

Rick Hudson, Intel

 Rick  Hudson

Richard L. Hudson is best known for his work in memory management including the invention of the Train Algorithm, the Sapphire Algorithm, the Mississippi Delta Algorithm, and leveraging the transactional memory to enable concurrent garbage collection. He pioneered the use of stack maps which enabled accurate garbage collection in statically typed languages like Java. He worked on transactional memory and was a driving force that led to the articulation of the x86 memory model. For the past 2+ years Richard has worked on the River Trail team researching the concurrent programming models needed to implement a more visual and immersive web experience.

Richard joined Intel in 1998 where he has worked on programming language runtimes, memory management, concurrency, synchronization, memory models, and programming model issues. He went to Shortridge, holds a B.A. degree from Hampshire College, and an M.S. degree from the University of Massachusetts.