HOW WEBASSEMBLY IS CHANGING RESEARCH COMPUTING

Abstract

Google Earth, a 3D representation of Earth from Google's parent company, Alphabet, is built on WebAssembly. Danielji, an undergraduate computer-science student in Niema Moshiri's laboratory at the University of California, San Diego, used WebAssembly to build browser interfaces for many of his group's epidemiological resources, including one that identifies evolutionary relationships between viral genomes1. [...]WebAssembly is often used to build relatively simple tools or applied to computationally intensive pieces of larger web applications. Rather than having users install a conversion tool or upload their data to remote servers, Irber's WebAssembly implementation allows researchers to convert their files locally.