Parallel Level 2 and 3 BLAS: PBLAS
Goal
Port sequential library for shared memory machine that use the BLAS to distributed memory machines with little effort.

Reuse the existing software by hiding the message passing in a set of BLAS routines.

Parallel implementation of the BLAS that understands how the matrix is layed out and when called can perform not only the operation but the required data transfer.

LAPACK ScaLAPACK
BLAS PBLAS (BLAS, BLACS)

Quality (maintenance)
Portability (F77 - C)
Efficiency - Reuseability (BLAS, BLACS)
Hide Parallelism in (P)BLAS

Interface Reusability `CALL DGEXXX( M, N, A( I, J), LDA )`
`CALL PDGEXXX( M, N, A, I, J, ADESC )`

Global Indexes
Array Descriptor
Same functionality as sequential BLAS

Slide 71 of SIAM Tutorial, Jack Dongarra UT/ORNL. (Updated 01/31/95)