Ernő Dávid, Dávid El-Saig, Zoltán Lehóczky and Gergely Gábor Barnaföldi (2020.01.01 - 2020.11.30)

Wigner Research Centre for Physics and Lombiq Technologies Ltd. cooperation

Publication: Implementing Hastlayer support for Xilinx SoC Zynq FPGA family

Abstract: Hastlayer by Lombiq Technologies allows software developers of the .NET platform to utilize FPGAs as compute accelerators. It converts standard .NET constructs into equivalent hardware implementations, automatically enhancing the performance while lowering the power consumption of suitable algorithms. Developers keep writing .NET programs as usual, no hardware design knowledge is required.

Hastlayer needs to support FPGA boards specifically, and formerly it only supported one that was suitable for testing and creating proof of concepts, but not for high performance computing scenarios. The recently finished work in collaboration with Wigner RCP was about making it support high-performance FPGAs of the Microsoft Catapult platform. Wigner's task was to create the FPGA-side hardware framework that hosts the automatically generated hardware cores created by Hastlayer.

The current project is similar, but about making Hastlayer support all SDAccel-compatible Xilinx FPGAs. This will open up a wide range of possibilities for Hastlayer-accelerated applications by unlocking the large product line of high-performance SDAccel-compatible FPGAs running on premise, as well as in multiple public cloud computing providers.