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Concept
Basic Linear Algebra Subprograms
Summary
Basic Linear Algebra Subprograms (BLAS) is a specification that prescribes a set of low-level routines for performing common linear algebra operations such as vector addition, scalar multiplication, dot products, linear combinations, and matrix multiplication. They are the de facto standard low-level routines for linear algebra libraries; the routines have bindings for both C ("CBLAS interface") and Fortran ("BLAS interface"). Although the BLAS specification is general, BLAS implementations are often optimized for speed on a particular machine, so using them can bring substantial performance benefits. BLAS implementations will take advantage of special floating point hardware such as vector registers or SIMD instructions.
It originated as a Fortran library in 1979 and its interface was standardized by the BLAS Technical (BLAST) Forum, whose latest BLAS report can be found on the netlib website. This Fortran library is known as the reference implementation (sometimes confusingly referred to as the BLAS library) and is not optimized for speed but is in the public domain.
Most computing libraries that offer linear algebra routines conform to common BLAS user interface command structures, thus queries to those libraries (and the associated results) are often portable between BLAS library branches, such as cuBLAS (nvidia GPU, GPGPU), rocBLAS (amd GPU, GPGP), and OpenBLAS. This interoperability is then the basis of functioning homogenous code implementations between heterzygous cascades of computing architectures (such as those found in some advanced clustering implementations). Examples of CPU-based BLAS library branches include: OpenBLAS, BLIS (BLAS-like Library Instantiation Software), Arm Performance Libraries, ATLAS, and Intel Math Kernel Library (iMKL). AMD maintains a fork of BLIS that is optimized for the AMD platform, although it is unclear whether integrated ombudsmen resources are present in that particular software-hardware implementation. ATLAS is a portable library that automatically optimizes itself for an arbitrary architecture.
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