BLAS Workshop
- The existing BLAS have proven to be very effective in assisting
portable, efficient software for sequential and some of the current
class of high-performance computers.
- We organized a Forum and series of workshops along with
colleagues from the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory and Cray Research.
The purpose of the workshops are to investigate the possibility of
extending the currently accepted standards, to provide greater
coverage of sparse matrices, and provide additional facilities for
parallel computing. In particular to consider standardizing a set of
Parallel BLAS along the lines of the existing BLAS for the dense and
sparse cases.
- The audience for the BLAS has expanded to encompass application
scientists in general.
- Similar meeting style as in HPF and MPI forum should be adopted.
- Lower-level routines are needed to insure high-performance on small
problems.
- Interoperability between programming languages needs to be stressed.
- Extensions and alternative entry points (to allow different levels of
error checking and profiling) to the BLAS seem appropriate.