Just a quick and possible innumerate thought re WebGL (which is OpenGL exposed as Web browser content via Javascript).
Perhaps the big heavy number-crunching can be done on server-side Mahout / Hadoop, but with a role for *delivery* of computed matrices in the browser? The memory concerns are still relevant, but if you can get data into GPU shaders (via texture) there might be modern Web application scenarios where it's worth doing some computations locally on GPU is worthwhile. Last time i looked, getting floats off of the graphics card wasn't easy with standard WebGL btw, though there's a WebCL looming too. Dan
