ITL Hosts BLAS Technical Forum
November 1998
ITL's Mathematical and Computational Sciences Division hosted a meeting of the
BLAS Technical Forum in Gaithersburg on October 8-9. The forum is a consortium
of industrial, academic and government partners who are developing interface
standards for Basic Linear Algebra Subprograms (BLAS). The major aim of these
standards is to enable linear algebra libraries to interoperate efficiently and
easily. Obtaining high performance for core linear algebra operations is
important since these form the performance-critical portion of many numeric
applications. The BLAS for dense matrix operations in Fortran, which were
developed by researchers in the 1980s, have been widely adopted by commercial
software and hardware manufacturers. Subgroups within the forum are addressing
extensions into new areas such as sparse matrices and extended precision
arithmetic, as well as alternate language bindings for the legacy BLAS. The
forum is chaired by Professor Jack Dongarrra of the University of Tennessee at
Knoxville. Roldan Pozo of NIST chairs the subcommittee on sparse BLAS.
The October meeting was attended by about 20 individuals, including
representatives from Intel, Hewlett-Packard, Tera, NAG, Inc., Bell Labs,
NIST, the University of Tennessee at Knoxville, the University of
California at Berkeley and Florida Tech.
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