Looks interesting

[brunobasto]

I'm following a coursera course about machine learning and was about to write my own library for doing efficient matrix operations in javascript until I found this. Nice work.

One question (I haven't browsed the source code much): In what operations are you leveraging gpu.js? Is it only matrix multiplication for now?

[paolodelia99]

Hey Bruno!
First of all thank you for showing interest in my project. Yes, for now only the matrix multyplication is leveraging gpu.js . Now I'm trying to figuring out how to bind LAPACK and BLAS (two low level linear algebra libraries) in my code in order to have really efficent linear-algebra subroutines.

[brunobasto]

Cool. Have you tried emscritpem with webassembly for nodejs? https://dev.to/azure/experimenting-with-web-assembly-and-nodejs-40f4

[brunobasto]

Actually, there seems to be a port already: https://github.com/likr/emlapack

[brunobasto]

By using webassembly instead of directly bind to native libs you'd get the benefit of making your library work on browsers too...

[paolodelia99]

Great! Thanks for the advice. Now i'm gonna to take a look to web assembly.

[paolodelia99]

But also emlapack seem to be a valide alternative.

[brunobasto]

So I decided to try something: https://github.com/brunobasto/quick-matrix

From my experiments, doing calculations with WASM is really faster than plain JavaScript or even GPU.js. Actually, I'm finding GPU.js to be really slow. Maybe I'm doing something wrong or my graphics card is just not good. I even tried to memoize the kernels so that the overhead of compiling it would not be a problem but it still seems to be slower than just plain JavaScript..

[paolodelia99]

I've also tried WASM in the last couple of days, and I found it really fast! I think that's the way to go to build the low level API. And yes, Gpu.js is slow that plain javascript when dealing with small matrices. I've found it faster when the matrices are bigger than 1024 x 1024.

[paolodelia99]

Hey Bruno,
I'm trying to build the wasm api for the most used matrix functions. But I had struggle to wrap up a C struct and use it in js code. Do you think c++ would be better? Since I kinda new to C and C++ would you mind to help me building the WASM api, becuase from what I've seen from your experiment you're more experience c/c++ that me. Thanks.

[brunobasto]

To be honest, I haven't tried to pass anything other than numbers or arrays from JS to C with emscripten. Maybe this or this can help. I just found out about this bind functionality so probably with c++ it will be easier to do what you want.