Using WebGL for making some general purpose computing

Hi @all!

I’m new to WebGL, and have limited experience on OpenGL on the Desktop, but I’m wondering something about WebGL.

Do you think it would be possible to use WebGL (or OpenGL ES 2.0) to do some kind of general purpose computing? like accelerated AES encoding/deconding, or a more simply, producing MD5 or SHA1 hashes?

I’m asking this because I’m making some tests on distributed map reduce on the browser using javascript, I would like to explore the options of optimizing the calculations ever further by using WebGL on the client side.

If this is possible, can you please give me some pointers or directions on something I can read about it?

Thank you!