BLAS

The BLAS home page is

http://www.netlib.org/blas/

There are three sources for the BLAS, as detailed below. Regardless of the origin of the BLAS library selected, the BLAS test suite (available on the BLAS webpage) should be run to ensure proper installation.

1. Vendor or ISV (Independent Software Vendor) BLAS. These can be supplied by default with the computer, or can be available as a separate software package. An optimized BLAS library gives much better performance than the model implementation. For a list of vendor- and ISV-supplied BLAS see

   http://www.netlib.org/blas/faq.html

2. Automatically Tuned Linear Algebra Software (ATLAS). The ATLAS project uses empirical techniques to automatically optimize software for unknown architectures. The software produced by the ATLAS project provides a complete, highly optimized BLAS for almost all cache-based architectures, and includes standard Fortran 77 and ANSI C APIs for all routines. For installation, ATLAS requires an ANSI C compiler, and access to Unix-like build tools such as make. ATLAS runs on all versions of Unix and Windows. The performance of ATLAS is on par with the best hand-coded implementations on all known architectures. See [43], and the links given below, for further details.

   http://www.netlib.org/atlas/

   Prebuilt ATLAS libraries are available for a variety of architectures.

   http://www.netlib.org/atlas/archives/

   ATLAS is available via ftp as follows: =5mm

   • ATLAS (Source code and documentation)

     anon ftp to www.netlib.org
     cd atlas
     binary
     get atlas_<version>.tgz
     

   • ATLAS archives (Prebuilt libraries)

     anon ftp to www.netlib.org
     cd atlas/archives
     binary
     ls
     get the proper atlas-file

   where <version> denotes the current version of the software.

3. The model implementation. This package is available at

   http://www.netlib.org/blas/blas.tgz

   and is available via ftp as follows:

   anon ftp to www.netlib.org
   cd blas
   binary
   get blas.tgz

   This file contains the Fortran 77 reference implementation of the Level 1, Level 2 and Level 3 BLAS routines in all precisions. The routines must be compiled by the local Fortran compiler, and archived into a library, e.g., libblas.a. It should be emphasized that the performance achieved using this version of the BLAS will not be as high as could be obtained with a machine-specific implementation.
   N.B. The model implementation is also included in the LAPACK distribution file.