The matrix WWW pages provide users with links that effectively download individual matrices to the local browser. Currently all matrix data provided by Matrix Market is compressed using gzip. (Typically, WWW browsers uncompress these files after downloading so that they can be displayed in the browser.)
While there are a multitude of matrix formats available (see for example, (Barrett, et al., 1994)) only a subset of these are necessary for exchanging sparse matrix data, since once read into memory, transformation between formats is straightforward. In particular, we supply only two formats: coordinate text file format and the Harwell-Boeing exchange format, the former for its simplicity, the latter as the current interchange standard for sparse matrix research.