Contents tagged with Release
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Hastlayer is now fully open-source!
We at Lombiq are quite fond of open-source: The company was born out of open-source, and we have a huge amount of open-source activities. However, until now, Hastlayer wasn't fully open-source. This is because the hardware transformation, so the secret sauce that turns your .NET apps into their own processors, was, well, secret. Not anymore though!
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Supporting large Catapult FPGAs - Hastlayer v1.1 is here!
It's been a long time without a release, but now we're finally there: Hastlayer v1.1 is out with a lot of improvements! The biggest one is the support for the large FPGAs of Microsoft's Catapult platform. Hastlayer is now ready for complex high-performance applications!
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New timing values and why you should care - Hastlayer v1.0.10 released
Today we've released v1.0.10 of Hastlayer. This is mostly a bugfix release, but there is one important detail we've changed: Timing values. What are timing values and why is this a good thing?
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v1.0.9 released with many fixes and a new sample
Hastlayer v1.0.9 is out! Not many new features but you'll love these bugfixes! Here are the most important changes:
- Binary operator expressions (like 1 + 2) could in some cases give incorrect results, as could remainder operations (e.g. 9 % 4). These are all fixed now.
- When you try to transform a piece of code with Hastlayer which Hastlayer doesn't support now better error messages will be surfaced, hinting you what exactly the problem is.
- And there is also a new Loopback sample that just sends back what you send it from the host PC. This is to test connectivity and use as a generic testbed.
Hope you'll like these! We've been working on features too, for example adding floating point support, which is mostly done now. We'll talk about it at various conference, starting with ones in Singapore this week!
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Method inlining, fixed point arithmetic and more - Hastlayer v1.0.8 released
New year, new Hastlayer version - and we think this one is quite exciting, a lot of improvements arrived! Let's see the highlights:
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Hastlayer now supports method inlining. Method inlining is when a compiler basically copies the implementation of the method to the place where it's called, thus avoiding the overhead of a method call but making the program bigger. We've added support for the
AggressiveInliningattribute so you can instruct Hastlayer to inline methods, just as you'd do the same with the .NET compiler. Since method calls in hardware are also an overhead you can vastly improve the performance of your Hastlayer-using code if it contains many small methods that are frequently called. In our tests with the posit floating point type we cut down execution time by about 40%! - Added a 64b fixed-point arithmetic library and made it Hastlayer-compatible. Why is this good? Although making computations with integers is very efficient (and fast), sometimes you need to use fractions. Before the only option with Hastlayer was to scale up your floating point numbers (multiplying them by 10000 for example so there will be no digits after the decimal point), let Hastlayer do the work, then scale them back down. But now we added a 64b number type that can also handle fractions, it's just that there are 31 bits for the digits before the decimal point and 32 bits for the ones after it. But still, the computations will be quite efficient. Nevertheless we're also working on floating point support.
- Added support for
refandoutparameters and made configuration of parallelized code a bit easier.
So Hastlayer just got a lot better for a lot of programs!
For more details and the corresponding downloads visit the Hastlayer SDK and Hastlayer Hardware Framework - Xilinx repos on GitHub. Be sure to also check out the updated documentation on how to utilize these new features.
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Hastlayer v1.0.7 released with a scientific computing example
The new version of Hastlayer is out! Apart from nice Transformer improvements this also includes one huge example: An implementation of the 3D Kardar-Parisi-Zhang surface growth simulation algorithm. This algorithm simulates how the surface of a material (like a silicon wafer used in chip manufacturing) changes over time. We created the KPZ example in collaboration with the Wigner Research Centre for Physics to test against an existing GPU implementation (testing is upcoming).
Also, don't forget that the Hastlayer World Tour is still on with three events coming up!
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World Tour, release, floating point support and more - short news
Some short news around Hastlayer: what happened in the last month or so?
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The Hastlayer SDK and hardware project is now open source!
You may have noticed that GitHub link above. It means Hastlayer goes open source! Both components that you use locally to utilize Hastlayer are now up on GitHub; you can start with the Hastlayer SDK project. Source code, documentation and a visibility of project progress and direction in form of issues is now all transparent. How does this sound?