If you haven't been on any of the older or very recent conferences where you could see Hastlayer for yourself then here's something for you: a short but hands-on, very technical, very developer-focused Hastlayer demo! Just comment your questions/remarks here or below the video. Get in touch with us if you could use Hastlayer!

GPU programming is commonplace today but utilizing FPGAs to make softwar faster isn't: that's how Hastlayer arrived at the conference called GPU Day to make the power of FPGAs available to the masses! GPU Day is a yearly GPU and now also high-performance computing conference in Budapest, Hungary (and it's now actually two days!). The organizer is the internationally renowed Wigner Research Centre for Physics, a scientific institute also using GPUs and FPGAs for computing tasks. The conference is intentionally kept small with around 80 attendees, but this also allows for visitors to really connect with each other. This year the venue for GPU Day was the futuristic Wigner Data Centre, the computer datacenter that processes data of CERN's particle physics experiments. And the event was a blast: great crowd, insightful discussions and exciting talks by people from around Europe. We presented the state of Hastlayer with a live demonstration, an improved version of what we've shown at ProgSCon. Unfortunately no recordings or photos, sorry!

ProgSCon is a cozy programming conference held yearly in London, organized by a group of enthusiastic volunteers. We at Lombiq also sponsored the conference in 2016 and gave the first public full-blown demo of Hastlayer ever! Turning software into hardware - HastlayerSoftware is flexible, specialized hardware is extremely fast. So why not write software, then turn it into a computer chip? This is what Hastlayer does by transforming .NET software into FPGA-implemented logic circuits.The result is faster and uses less power while developers just keep on writing software. You may not be able to tell just by looking at it but behind some function calls now really an FPGA is working! (slides) This was the topic of our talk and hopefully attendees weren't disappointed: for the first time we showcased Hastlayer in its entirety, including how you as a developer would utilize it. You can also watch the full talk: If you're interested you can also download the slides of the Hastlayer talk here. Want to see our rig? These two very ordinary FPGA boards can make your software orders of magnitude faster!

The first public unveil of Hastlayer happened in the fall of 2015 on the FPL 2015 conference (FPL stands for Field-programmable Logic, so everything related to the technology of FPGAs). FPL 2015 was organized by the Imperial College London and held in the university's London campus. We with Hastlayer got the opportunity to take part on the Demo Night and showcase the state of the project to the attendees. The Hastlayer table/"booth" with our poster and two from the Hastlayer team: Zoltán Lehóczky and Benedek Farkas Attendees were mostly professionals who work with field-programmable technologies, less software developers who'd need a solution like Hastlayer. Despite this the feedback we got was very valuable. People generally really liked how easy to use Hastlayer is. And here's the poster from the above picture!