I think WASM and WebGPU is a good idea to run "What If" scenarios in browser

2 vinserello 2 9/1/2025, 6:34:09 PM
In the last years I needed to run quick "what if" tests on real data, multiple times. Some friends (data analysts) told me to do it in spreadsheets, but melted as soon as I pushed more than a few hundred thousand rows. Traditional BI tools... I tried then Tableau but was overkilling

Consider that I'm building a web-based data analysis tool so I tried pushing the whole thing into the browser. At first I thought it would choke, but with WASM for the heavy math and WebGPU for projections and charting, it actually worked. The browser can chew through millions of rows if you stream chunks right, and UMAP/clustering runs smooth enough inside Chrome to be usable.

The hard part wasn't performance, it was UX. People don't want to wire up nodes or think about pipelines — they just want to tweak a number and watch the graphs shift. That forced me to rethink the interface into something closer to a scenario builder than a workflow editor.

The result is Datastripes: https://datastripes.com Runs entirely client-side, no backend. I'm still figuring out limits, especially memory management and GPU stability across devices. Anyone here has tried pushing WASM+WebGPU this far? Do you found better ways to handle large "what if" workloads in the browser?

Comments (2)

sargstuff · 3h ago
What type of data "tests"? aka modeling, simulation, statistical regression, etc.

Wide variety of "what if" data environments/systems which have web accessible interfaces to backends (that are not just database systems).

commerical mathlab, sass

open source[0]: scilab; sagemath; numpy; gnu octave; julia; juniper

[0] : additional link references beyond "5 open source alternatives to MATHLAB" : https://opensource.com/alternatives/matlab

ycombinatrix · 8h ago
i have no idea what you mean by "what if workload"