Parallel JavaScript with ParallelJS
One of the coolest new possibilities arriving along with HTML5 was the Worker interface of the Web Workers API. Beforehand, we had to introduce some tricks to still present a responsive website to the user. The Worker interface allows us to create functions that feature long runtime and require high-computational effort. Furthermore, Worker instances may be used simultaneously giving us the possibility to spawn as many of these workers as we desire.
In this article I’m going to discuss why multi-threading is important and how to implement it in JavaScript with ParallelJS.
Why Multi-Threading?
This is a valid question. Historically, the ability to spawn threads provided an elegant way to partition the work within a process. The operating system is responsible for scheduling the time given for each thread, such that threads with higher priority and more work are preferred to low-priority idle threads.
Over the last few years, simultaneous multi-threading (SMT) has become essential to access the computing abilities of modern CPUs. The reason is simple: Moore’s law is still valid regarding the number of transistors per area. However, frequency scaling had to stop for a number of reasons. Therefore, the available transistors had to be used otherwise. It was decided that architectural improvements (SIMD, for example) and multi-cores represent the optimum choice.
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