VSC-WebGPU: A Selenium-based VS Code Extension For Local Edit And Cloud Compilation on WebGPU

TL;DR

This paper introduces VSC-WebGPU, a VS Code extension that enables students to seamlessly write code locally and push it to a WebGPU cloud system for compilation and execution, enhancing cloud-based programming workflows.

Contribution

It presents a novel VS Code extension that integrates local coding with cloud GPU execution via WebGPU, streamlining the development process for students and automated tools.

Findings

Seamless code transfer from local VS Code to WebGPU cloud system.

Automated login, pull, push, and exit processes for cloud interaction.

Enhanced user experience for cloud-based GPU programming.

Abstract

With the rapid development of information transmission, Software as a Service (SaaS) is developing at a rapid speed that everything originally local tends to be transplanted onto servers and executed on the cloud. WebGPU is such a SaaS system that it holds the GPU-equipped server to execute students' CUDA code and releases the RESTful front-end website for students to write their code on. However, programming on an HTML-based interface is not satisfactory due to a lack of syntax highlighting and automatic keyword complement. On the other side, Visual Studio Code is now becoming the most popular programming interface due to its strong community and eclectic functionalities. Thus, we propose such a system that, students write code locally using VS Code with its coding-auxiliary extensions, and push the code to WebGPU with only one button pressed using our VSC-WebGPU extension. The extension is divided into 4 parts: the login process for automatically logging the student into WebGPU, the pull process that pulls the code down to the local workspace, the push process that copies the code to the browser for compiling and running, and the exit process to exit the browser and close the connection. This 4-step architecture is also applicable for any other automated tools to push local code to authorization-required SaaS systems using Web automata.