Implementing support for high-performance Microsoft Catapult FPGAs in the Hastlayer .NET high-level synthesis toolbox
Ernő Dávid, Dávid El-Saig and Zoltán Lehóczky (2019.08.31 - 2019.12.31)
Wigner RCP és Lombiq Technologies Ltd. cooperation
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 work ongoing in collaboration with Wigner RCP is about making it support high-performance FPGAs of the Microsoft Catapult platform. Wigner's task is to create the FPGA-side hardware framework that hosts the automatically generated hardware cores created by Hastlayer.