title: pWeb: A High-Performance, Parallel-Computing Framework for Web-Browser-Based Medical Simulation.
abstract: This work presents a pWeb - a new language and compiler for parallelization of client-side compute intensive web applications such as surgical simulations. The recently introduced HTML5 standard has enabled creating unprecedented applications on the web. Low performance of the web browser, however, remains the bottleneck of computationally intensive applications including visualization of complex scenes, real time physical simulations and image processing compared to native ones. The new proposed language is built upon web workers for multithreaded programming in HTML5. The language provides fundamental functionalities of parallel programming languages as well as the fork/join parallel model which is not supported by web workers. The language compiler automatically generates an equivalent parallel script that complies with the HTML5 standard. A case study on realistic rendering for surgical simulations demonstrates enhanced performance with a compact set of instructions.
authors.affiliation: Computer Science Department, University of Central Arkansas, Conway, AR, USA.
authors.forename: Tansel
authors.initials: T
authors.lastname: Halic
authors.affiliation: Center for Modeling, Simulation and Imaging in Medicine (CeMSIM), Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Troy, NY, USA.
authors.forename: Woojin
authors.initials: W
authors.lastname: Ahn
authors.affiliation: Center for Modeling, Simulation and Imaging in Medicine (CeMSIM), Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Troy, NY, USA.
authors.forename: Suvranu
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: De
mesh_terms: D013502:General Surgery / Q000193:education*; D006801:Humans; D020407:Internet; D011381:Programming Languages; D000066908:Simulation Training