BLAS Technical Forum

The next BLAST Forum Meeting is tentatively scheduled for March 16-18, 1999!

• Minutes from the previous meeting (Dec 14-16, 1998 at UC Berkeley) are now available!

ATTENTION AUTHORS: If you would like to modify the latex source of a chapter, please go to the chapter checkout page.

Reference implementation for the C interface to the Legacy BLAS (May, 1998)

Reference implementation for the Fortran95 interface to the Legacy BLAS

The existing BLAS have proven to be very effective in assisting portable, efficient software for sequential, vector and shared memory high-performance computers. We have decided to establish a Forum to consider expanding the BLAS in a number of ways in light of modern software, language, and hardware developments.

Goals:

• Stimulate thought,
• Discussion,
• Functionality and
• Future development of a set of standards for basic matrix data structures,
• Both dense and sparse,
• Calling sequences for a set of low-level computational kernels for the parallel and sequential settings.

Major aims of these standards will be to enable linear algebra libraries (both public domain and commercial) to interoperate efficiently and easily. Numerical methods for dense matrices on parallel computers require high efficiency kernels that provide functionality similar to that in traditional BLAS on sequential machines. We have begun the forum with a discussion of the need for a light weight interface to much of the functionality of traditional BLAS. In addition, iterative and sparse direct methods require additional functionality not in traditional BLAS.

Who should be viewed as the end users of the interfaces developed by the forum? computer vendors (both hardware and software), average application programmers, higher level library writers? We would like to get your input on these questions as well as what you would like to see in a set of basic operations for linear algebra.

Minutes from the December 14-16, 1998 BLAST Forum Meeting at LBL, Berkeley, CA.

Minutes from the October 8-9, 1998 BLAST Forum Meeting at NIST, Washington, D.C..

Minutes from the April 27-29, 1998 BLAST Forum Meeting at Cray Research, Eagan, MN.

Minutes from the December 3-5, 1997 BLAST Forum Meeting at Hilton Hotel, Knoxville, TN.

Minutes from the August 14-15, 1997 BLAST Forum Meeting at Benson Hotel, Portland, OR.

Minutes from the February 27-28, 1997 BLAST Forum Meeting at Clarion Hotel, Dallas, TX.

Minutes from the November 7-8, 1996 BLAST Forum Meeting at Cray Research, Eagan, MN.

Minutes from the May 20-21, 1996 BLAST Forum Meeting in Atlanta.

Minutes from the February 19-20, 1996 BLAST Forum Meeting in Nashville.

Information from the BLAS Technical Workshop held on November 13-14, 1995 at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville.

For a preliminary set of forum rules see: rules A number of mailing lists have been set up. The mail is being archived on netlib in directory blast. The mailing lists are

• blast-comm@cs.utk.edu -- general mailing list to all
• blast-funct@cs.utk.edu -- for discussion of what functions should be included
• blast-lite@cs.utk.edu -- for discussion of a ``light'' weight interface for the BLAS
• blast-parallel@cs.utk.edu -- for discussion of parallel processing
• blast-sparse@cs.utk.edu -- for discussion of sparse operations
• blast-lb@cs.utk.edu -- for discussion of language bindings
• blast-nearterm@cs.utk.edu -- for discussion of short term goals

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To send mail to the list simply:

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The mail is being archived in netlib under directory blast.