Filed under: Mozilla, Browsers
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.
I don't know if this is a labor of love or merely the brainchild of four very gifted games designers, but Level Up is a really weird mash-up of gaming elements that you have probably never seen in a Flash game before.
Let's start with the premise itself: Groundhog Day meets Memento. The game experience revolves around 'days': you explore the world and the clock slowly ticks towards the evening. You bounce around picking up gems and talking to the denizens of 'Level Upland'. Eventually you feel tired and head back to ...
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
kojo87 said 7:14PM on 11-06-2009
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...
Reply
adombom said 9:21PM on 11-06-2009
Doesn't ATI have something similar to CUDA?
Ayle said 12:03AM on 11-07-2009
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.
Darren said 12:05AM on 11-07-2009
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 Thompson said 2:29AM on 11-08-2009
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.
Reply
Nick said 12:22PM on 11-07-2009
This might be interesting to implement OpenGL and OpenVG support for the Gecko engine like Opera did with the Vega rendering engine for Presto.
Reply