Small, Hot and Parallel: The Future of Web Browsing (and Computing)
Date: 9 October 2007
Time: 4:00pm
Location: 5th Floor Seminar Room, 70 Symonds St
Speaker: Dr Robert O'Callahan, Mozilla Corporation
Event type: Seminar
Overview
Continual improvements in transistor density let us pack more computing power into smaller and smaller devices. At the same time, software is increasingly being delivered in the form of Web applications. The problem is, how can we build a great Web browser that fits in the palm of your hand? Small physical size presents human interface challenges. I'll discuss some neat new ideas on input and screen technology that may help. A bigger challenge is that power constraints will require these devices to have many small, slow CPU cores instead of a few big ones. Web browsers are already horrendously complex pieces of software and today's technology for parallel programming is awful; trying to build a highly parallel browser with these tools would be quixotic. I'll talk about new techniques being developed, such as transactional memory, for unstructured parallel programming and how they might be applied to make a parallel browser feasible.
- For further information contact:
- Denis Loiselle