This is basically Tensorflow enabled to run in browser and server environments. And it does have GPGPU support via Tensorflow bindings and WebGL. Yes, really.
(To prevent confusion I should mention that I am only talking about JS in the browser.)
WebGL without compute shaders it anything but general compute. There have been some attempts at shoehorning matrix multiplication and other functions required for neural networks into WebGL, but the performance is abysmal due to API limitations.
The actual math in propel seems to be based on https://github.com/PAIR-code/deeplearnjs which has a benchmark website https://deeplearnjs.org/demos/benchmarks/ but the results for the GPU implementation are meaningless because they measure CPU execution time instead of GPU execution time. That's like benchmarking a server by measuring how long it takes to send an http request without waiting for the response.
With proper benchmarking I get about 500 milliseconds for a 1024x1024-by-1024x1024 matrix multiplication, or 4 GFLOPS. CUDA can do 500 GFLOPS on my GPU, so the WebGL implementation is 125 times slower.
Something fishy seems to be going on with their CPU benchmark as well, since it is 2500 times slower than Intel MKL on this machine.
WebGL without compute shaders it anything but general compute. There have been some attempts at shoehorning matrix multiplication and other functions required for neural networks into WebGL, but the performance is abysmal due to API limitations.
The actual math in propel seems to be based on https://github.com/PAIR-code/deeplearnjs which has a benchmark website https://deeplearnjs.org/demos/benchmarks/ but the results for the GPU implementation are meaningless because they measure CPU execution time instead of GPU execution time. That's like benchmarking a server by measuring how long it takes to send an http request without waiting for the response.
With proper benchmarking I get about 500 milliseconds for a 1024x1024-by-1024x1024 matrix multiplication, or 4 GFLOPS. CUDA can do 500 GFLOPS on my GPU, so the WebGL implementation is 125 times slower.
Something fishy seems to be going on with their CPU benchmark as well, since it is 2500 times slower than Intel MKL on this machine.