[rescue] Vector library

[James Lockwood]

On Fri, 31 May 2002, Joshua D Boyd wrote:

> Has anyone ever seen or thought of a cross platform vector library?  I
> know that some exist, but what about one that works on plain Pentium
> Classics, but can also take advantage of 3D Now, Altivec, and VIS,
> while also scaling up to supporting Crays?

What do you mean by "vector"?  Linear algebra?  Eigenvalues?  FFT?

Places to start: BLAS 1-3, LINPACK/LAPACK, FFTPACK, VFFTPACK.  Every major
HPC vendor, Sun and Intel included, has optimized versions of these
libraries to wring out maximum performance for scientific code.  A number
of customers buy big boxes almost purely based on their benchmark scores
with these libs.

BLAS (Basic Linear Algebra Subprograms) is the most common core.  It was
originally a set of FORTRAN routines but there are implementations in many
languages and they can be linked into from C, FORTRAN, Ada, etc.
LINPACK/LAPACK generally sits on top of BLAS and provides compound
functions.

One free implementation is ATLAS:

http://math-atlas.sourceforge.net/

It is not heavily optimized for any particular platform but there are a
number of documents and references on their pages.  You will almost
certainly have the best performance if you use the library supplied by the
vendor of your hardware.

-James