UW AMath High Performance Scientific Computing
 
AMath 483/583 Class Notes
 
Spring Quarter, 2013

Table Of Contents

Previous topic

Timing code

Next topic

Jacobi iteration using OpenMP with parallel do constructs

This Page

Linear Algebra software

The BLAS

The Basic Linear Algebra Subroutines are extensively used in LAPACK, in other linear algebra packages, and elsewhere.

There are three levels of BLAS:

  • Level 1: Scalar and vector operations
  • Level 2: Matrix-vector operations
  • Level 3: Matrix-matrix operations

For general information about BLAS see http://www.netlib.org/blas/faq.html.

Optimized versions of the BLAS are available for many computer architectures. See

See also:

LAPACK

To install BLAS and LAPACK to work with gfortran, see:

On some linux systems, including the VM for the class, you can install both BLAS and LAPACK via:

$ sudo apt-get install liblapack-dev

Direct methods for sparse systems

Although iterative methods are often used for sparse systems, there are also excellent software packages for direct methods (such as Gaussian elimination):