Code Generation for Big Data Processing in the Web using WebAssembly

Abstract

Traditional clusters for cloud computing are quite hard to configure and setup, and the number of cluster nodes is limited by the available hardware in the cluster. We hence envision the concept of a Browser Cloud: One just has to visit with his/her web browser a certain webpage in order to connect his/her computer to the Browser Cloud. In this way the setup of the Browser Cloud is much easier than those of traditional clouds. Furthermore, the Browser Cloud has a much larger number of potential nodes, as any computer running a browser may connect to and be integrated in the Browser Cloud. New challenges arise when setting up a cloud by web browsers: Data is processed within the browser, which requires to use the technologies offered by the browser for this purpose. The typically used JavaScript runtime environment may be too slow, because JavaScript is an interpreted language. Hence we investigate the possibilities for computing the work-intensive part of the query processing inside a virtual machine of the web browser. The technology WebAssemby for virtual machines is recently supported by all major browsers and promises high speedups in comparison with JavaScript. Recent approaches to efficient Big Data processing generate code for the data processing steps of queries. To run the generated code in a WebAssembly virtual machine, an online compiler is needed to generate the WebAssembly bytecode from the generated code. Hence our main contribution is an online compiler to WebAssembly bytecode especially developed to run in the web browser and for Big Data processing based on code generation of the processing steps. In our experiments, the runtimes of Big Data processing using JavaScript is compared with running WebAssembly technologies in the major web browsers