from Hacker News

Show HN: HipScript – Run CUDA in the browser with WebAssembly and WebGPU

by lights0123 on 1/7/25, 3:44 PM with 32 comments

• by Ameo on 1/7/25, 8:11 PM

  The GoL example it loaded with seemed to be running way slower than I expected it to. It turns out that there's actually a `usleep(1000 * 100)` call in the code which was inserted to make it easier to see the output; the actual kernels execute quickly and take up very little GPU time.

  When I looked at the profiler, I was confused to see that one worker thread was at 100% usage the whole time it was running. At first, I thought that maybe it was actually running the code via Wasm on the CPU rather than on the GPU like it said.

  Instead, it turns out that the worker was just running `emscripten_futex_wait` - which as far as I can tell is implemented by busy waiting in a loop. Probably doesn't matter for performance since I imagine that's just for the sleep call anyway.

  ----

  Altogether this is an incredibly cool tool. I'm sure there is some performance gap compared to native, but even so this is a extremely impressive and likely has a ton of potential use cases.

• by _nalply on 1/7/25, 7:58 PM

  Firefox supports WebGPU, but needs a setting in about:config. I enabled the setting but HipScript still denies running on Firefox with the message: "Please try a Chromium-based browser like Google Chrome or Microsoft Edge."

  Please do feature detection, not browser detection.

• by syrusakbary on 1/7/25, 11:23 PM

  This is an awesome use of WASIX [1] and the Wasmer SDK [2]. Quite exciting to see!

  I recommend as well reading through the blogpost (repo on [3]): https://lights0123.com/blog/2025/01/07/hip-script/ (many things to improve on the Wasmer side... we have some work to do!)

  [1] https://wasix.org/

  [2] https://github.com/wasmerio/wasmer-js

  [3] https://github.com/lights0123/hipscript/

• by bagels on 1/7/25, 7:53 PM

  What an incredible demo/hack. This is actually the simplest way to actually execute CUDA code that I've seen.

• by grconner on 1/8/25, 12:24 AM

  This is just amazing. So clean and straightforward. On a Mac just run it in Chrome see things work automagically. For real fun change the generations constant to 2000 and delete the usleep line to see this thing really cook.

• by Cieric on 1/7/25, 9:58 PM

  I love the idea of this, but sadly I can't get it to work in Firefox, Chrome or Edge on my work pc, probably because I can't find "--enable-features=Vulkan" equivalent in the about:flags and the argument doesn't appear to work on windows. I'm actually a bit more curious about a standalone application that skips the webgpu part and goes straight to Vulkan as I would love to be able to experiment with some Cuda only applications.

• by punnerud on 1/7/25, 8:35 PM

  How performant is the CUDA code in browser compared to standalone program?

  Could we have PyTorch / ML training with CUDA through the browser performing ok?

• by samagra14 on 1/8/25, 4:36 AM

  Sounds interesting! I love all these edge experiments. But as long as there is architecture dependent code for models, I feel these edge experiments can't fully express their strong suit.

  You try to run something and Voila you need Ampere or Hopper or Laplace for flash attnt.

• by JackYoustra on 1/7/25, 8:03 PM

  I don't know why this never occurred to me. What a great website, glad you made it!

• by nullbyte on 1/8/25, 6:27 PM

  Finally I can use my website visitors to mine dogecoins

• by mlepath on 1/8/25, 4:51 AM

  This is really awesome. Tested it on both Nvidia and Mac GPUs.

  Interested to know how debugging in a real application would work since WASM is pretty hard to debug and GPU code is pretty hard to debug. I assume WASM GPU is ... very difficult to debug.

• by JonChesterfield on 1/7/25, 9:55 PM

  This feels like more stages than should be necessary (something should be able to do LLVM IR direct to WebGPU) but it's great to see it running, very nice!

• by uncheckederror on 1/8/25, 12:45 AM

  Impressed that this runs on my RX 6900XT (an RDNA2 GPU) in Chrome without any trouble. Very cool demo, excited to see how people leverage this capability.

• by ryanmerket on 1/7/25, 8:34 PM

  Very cool. Thank you for creating this!

• by Lockal on 1/8/25, 6:36 AM

  Now I wonder how long will it take to add chipStar/Clspv/Tint to https://github.com/jhuber6/doomgeneric/tree/amdgpu and run DOOM on WebGPU this time.

• by CharlesW on 1/7/25, 7:51 PM

  From the "Learn More" link (https://lights0123.com/blog/2025/01/07/hip-script/):

  "By chaining chipStar¹ (a HIP and NVIDIA® CUDA® to OpenCL compiler), Clspv² (an OpenCL to Vulkan compiler), and Tint³ (among others, a Vulkan shader to WebGPU shader compiler), you can run CUDA code in the browser!"

  ¹ https://github.com/CHIP-SPV/chipStar/ ² https://github.com/google/clspv/ ³ https://dawn.googlesource.com/dawn/+/refs/heads/main/src/tin...

• by bloomingkales on 1/7/25, 9:01 PM

  How is this different than web-llm?