Hastlayer: Turning software into computer chips

Hastlayer is an open-source tool that gives software developers a way of speeding up their programs while lowering their power consumption by basically turning them into computer chips. They write standard code, then instruct Hastlayer to process the computationally intensive part of their program. That part will then be converted to logic hardware, while the rest of the software interacts with it as usual: Function calls work without changes, but behind the scenes an embedded chip is crunching the data. This can provide a significant performance and power consumption benefit compared to CPU execution, especially if the algorithm is highly parallelized.

All this happens with FPGAs, which are chips that can be dynamically reconfigured to behave like any other computer chip.

Hastlayer is in a beta stage, showing promising results with highly parallelized computations. It's available to be used in all major cloud platforms, so you don't have to buy an FPGA or run FPGA vendor software. All that happens on a remote server, you just write code, or even better, we write it for you!

We’ve previously showcased Hastlayer at a number of conferences, including Microsoft's .NET Conf and IEEE events.