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GettingStarted.md

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Getting started

Overview

To begin working with Hastlayer you'll need the following:

  • The SDK and Hardware Framework repositories cloned.
  • Access to Hastlayer Remote Services, which does the actual .NET to hardware transformation. Evaluation, academic and personal access is currently free and you can sign up on hastlayer.com.
  • A compatible FPGA board. You have the following options here:
    • For simpler workloads and testing: The Nexys A7 (formerly known as Nexys 4 DDR) board (which is NOT the same as the non-DDR Nexys 4, be sure to purchase the linked board!) is suitable, so you'll need to purchase one. The Nexys A7-100T version is required. Note that this is a relatively low-end development board that can't fit huge algorithms and it only supports slow communication channels. So with this board Hastlayer is only suitable for simpler algorithms that only need to exchange small amount of data.
    • For academic workloads: Microsoft's FPGA platform, Project Catapult is supported too, which offers high-end hardware. You'll need to apply for a cloud Catapult node via the Project Catapult Academic Program. Be sure to let us know if you'd like to use Catapult and we'll help you get going.
    • For production-level commercial workloads:
  • Visual Studio 2019 or later installed (any edition will work).
  • On Linux if you are going to use System.Drawing (eg. the ImageProcessingAlgorithms sample) you need to install the Mono project's implementation of libgdiplus. On CentOS you need the "libgdiplus" package, while on Debian systems such as Ubuntu you need "libgdiplus" and "libc6-dev" too.

Catapult acknowledgment: The authors acknowledge the Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC) at The University of Texas at Austin for providing HPC resources that have contributed to the development of this project. This material is based on work supported by access to Project Catapult hardware and technology donated by Microsoft.

If you have a compatible FPGA board you can run the default sample even without having access to Hastlayer Remote Services.

Flavors of Hastlayer

The Hastlayer components come in two "flavors" with corresponding branches in their repositories:

  • Developer (dev branch): This is used by developers of Hastlayer itself. It includes the full source code. Most possibly you don't need this one.
  • Client (client branch): Used by end-users of Hastlayer who run Hastlayer in a client mode, accessing Hast.Core as a remote service, i.e. Hastlayer Remote Services. Hast.Core encompasses those components of Hastlayer that do the heavy lifting of software to hardware transformation. Most possibly you need this one.

You'll see this terminology be used further on.

First steps

These would be your first steps on starting to work with Hastlayer by getting the samples working:

  1. Clone the necessary repositories with git. Always checkout the client or dev branch corresponding to your flavor. Make sure to allow Git to initialize submodules!
    1. Clone the Hastlayer SDK repo.
    2. Clone of the the Hardware Framework repos corresponding to your choice of hardware platform:
  2. Set up the hardware project as explained in the Hardware Framework's documentation and program the FPGA for the first time.
  3. Open the Visual Studio solution of the SDK corresponding to your flavor of Hastlayer.
  4. Set the Hast.Samples.Consumer project (under the Samples folder) as the startup project here. If you're working in the client flavor then you'll need to configure your credentials, see that project's documentation.
  5. Start the sample project. That will by default run the sample that is also added by default to the Hardware project.
  6. You should be able to see the results of the sample in its console window.

If everything is alright follow up with the rest of this documentation to write your first own Hastlayer-using algorithm. You can also check out the many documented samples under the Samples solution folder.

Device-specific documentation

You can find out more about these devices from their Hastlayer driver's documentation: