One Codebase, Two Runtimes: The Promise and Perils of Isomorphic Scientific Computing in Node.js

For the last twenty years, scientific computing has largely followed a single assumption: computation belongs on servers, clusters, or specialized environments.

Node.js quietly breaks that assumption.

Today, a numerical library published to npm can run inside a datacenter, a browser tab, an Electron application, a notebook environment, or an edge runtime. No recompilation. No language switch. No separate implementation.

This sounds obvious until you start asking uncomfortable questions.

Can the same statistical algorithm produce identical results across V8, SpiderMonkey, JavaScriptCore, and WebAssembly? What happens when compiler optimizations disagree? When floating point edge cases diverge? When native dependencies disappear?

This talk explores the strange reality of isomorphic scientific computing. We will look at what happens when numerical software stops belonging to a machine and starts belonging to an ecosystem.

Along the way, we'll discuss why JavaScript may be the first mainstream platform where scientific software can be distributed the same way we distribute web applications, and why achieving that vision is much harder than it initially appears.

To make sure beginners are also familiar with the concepts, the talk will also go through some demos in the initial part.