NHSE Software Catalog

BLACS (Basic Linear Algebra Communication Subprograms)

description

http://www.cs.utk.edu/~rwhaley/Blacs.html
The BLACS (Basic Linear Algebra Communication Subprograms) project is an
ongoing investigation whose purpose is to create a linear algebra oriented
message passing interface that may be implemented efficiently and uniformly
across a large range of distributed memory platforms.

The length of time required to implement efficient distributed memory algorithms
makes it impractical to rewrite programs for every new parallel machine. The
BLACS exist in order to make linear algebra applications both easier to program
and more portable. It is for this reason that the BLACS are used as the
communication layer of ScaLAPACK.
One of the main strengths of the BLACS is that code which uses the BLACS for
its communication layer can run unchanged on any supported platform.
The BLACS are written specifically for linear algebra programming. Since the
audience of the BLACS is known, the interface and methods of using the routines
can be simpler than for those of more general message passing layers.

keywords

high level communications library; linear algebra; message passing

contact

blacs@cs.utk.edu

environment

The BLACS have been written on top of the following message passing layers:

CMMD
Allows the BLACS to run on Thinking Machine's CM-5.
MPL
Allows the BLACS to run on IBM's SP series (SP1 and SP2).
NX
Allows the BLACS to run on Intel's supercomputer series (iPSC2,
iPSC/860, DELTA and PARAGON).
PVM
Allows the BLACS to run anywhere PVM is supported, which includes
most UNIX systems.