Subject: Recent advances

From: Robert van de Geijn <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 12 Apr 1996 15:45:33 -0500

Folks,

we at UT-Austin have been playing with a number of issues that may be
of interest to the BLAST forum.

As part of the PLAPACK project, we have implemented a Simple Library
(SL_library) which uses Physically Based Matrix Distribution (PBMD),
Object Based Programming (OBP), and recent advances in parallel linear
algebra algorithms.  The results are quite encouraging:

* We currently have about 1200 lines of code, primarily providing
the infrastructure for the object based library.  

* With this we should be able to implement all parallel blas in
another 1200 lines of code, 

* and the rest of "core" LAPACK in yet another 1200 lines.  

* What is also interesting is that we are getting the same high
performance as our hand coded parallel level 3 BLAS, on the Intel
Paragon.

For more information, the webpage for the SL_library can be accessed
through my home page:

        http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/rvdg

A more direct path to the reference manual, example of matrix-matrix
multiplication, and performance data, you can access

        http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/gunnels/SL_Library/library.html

We would welcome comments

Robert