WebFITS Stress Test (WebGL)
What's going on here?
One-hundred and seventy five images will be sent to your browser. As each image is received, a new thread is instantiated, the bytes are interpreted as compressed values, these values are decompressed to pixel intensities, and each one is sent to the graphics card as a texture. All of this happens in JavaScript. The image format is not JPG, PNG or TIFF. Not even GIF. Rather, the image format is FITS, the standard format for astronomical data.
Each image is a color composite made using three images, smashed together using a shader executed on the GPU. Note the responsiveness of the user interface. The UI does not lock because heavy tasks are not executed on the main thread. By the end of this demo, 175 threads (web workers) will have been instantiated to do the heavy lifting.
Click to begin