History: Early 70’s NATS Project
National Activity for Testing Software
(NSF, Argonne, Texas and Stanford)
Project to explore the problems of testing, certifying, disseminating and maintaining quality math software.
- First EISPACK, later FUNPACK
- Influenced other “PACK”s
- ELLPACK, FISKPACK, ITPACK,MINPACK,PDEPACK, QUADPACK, SPARSPAK, ROSEPACK, TOOLPACK, TESTPACK,LINPACK, LAPACK, ScaLAPACK . . .
Key attributes of math software
- reliability, robustness, structure, usability, and validity