The GAMS (Guide to Available Mathematical Software) repository at NIST (the National Institute of Standards and Technology) provides centralized access to the software modules that it catalogs [4]. Rather than operating a physical repository of its own, GAMS provides transparent access to multiple repositories operated by others. GAMS currently indexes four software repositories. Three of these repositories are maintained for use by NIST staff and contain proprietary software. The fourth is Netlib, discussed above. Source code is not available for the proprietary software, but documentation and example programs often are.
All software modules cataloged in GAMS have been assigned one or more problem classifications from the GAMS classification scheme, which is a tree-structured taxonomy of mathematical and statistical problems [3]. The user can use the taxonomy as a decision tree, or can enter keywords which are mapped to problem classes. In addition, users may search by package or module name.