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NFJS2025

WebGPU : Graphics, Computation, and Hardware

Certain software activities have traditionally required extra support to operate efficiently. The existence of GPUs, FPGAs, and ASICs have been useful for 3D graphics, scientific workloads, and reducing the power requirements for predictable functions such as video playback, cryptocurrency hashing, and accelerating encryption. As time has gone by, new opportunities to benefit from computational elements in our software systems have arisen from the demands of machine and deep learning activities and now even the rudimentary but impressive capabilities of generative AI systems and text synthesis engines such as ChatGPT.

Apple has their own APIs in the form of Metal2 to merge computation and graphics while the open standards world has Vulkan. These next generation, low-overhead APIs allow us to achieve the performance of OpenGL systems for a fraction of the time and power costs. They are not compatible, however, and aren't available in the browser, so the applications we build remain mired in the complexity explosion of feature-tested software asking its environment what is available.

WebGPU is a new standards-based abstraction over both of these main APIs that will be available both inside and outside of the browser. Come learn about the continued evolution of several trends in our industry that are increasingly part of the modern software we are expected to build.

We will cover:

  • The history of hardware-accelerated software
  • Overview of the WebGPU workflows
  • The WebGPU Shader Language (WGSL) used to express the behavior to run on the hardware
  • Implementations of WebGPU
  • Building applications that can run both inside and outside of the browser

Brian Sletten

About Brian Sletten

Brian Sletten is a liberal arts-educated software engineer with a focus on forward-leaning technologies. His experience has spanned many industries including retail, banking, online games, defense, finance, hospitality and health care. He has a B.S. in Computer Science from the College of William and Mary and lives in Auburn, CA. He focuses on web architecture, resource-oriented computing, social networking, the Semantic Web, AI/ML, data science, 3D graphics, visualization, scalable systems, security consulting and other technologies of the late 20th and early 21st Centuries. He is also a rabid reader, devoted foodie and has excellent taste in music. If pressed, he might tell you about his International Pop Recording career.

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