Re: GSL v2.0 discussion

[Rhys Ulerich <rhys dot ulerich at gmail dot com>]

>From today's NA Digest (http://www.netlib.org/na-digest-html), a
tidbit that's of interest for the current discussion...

- Rhys

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From: Field G. Van Zee field@cs.utexas.edu
Date: April 07, 2014
Subject: The union of libflame and LAPACK

Sponsored by an NSF Software Infrastructure for Sustained
Innovation grant, we have been developing a new, vertically
integrated dense linear algebra software stack. At the bottom of
this software stack is the BLAS-like Library Instantiation Software
(BLIS). Above this, targeting sequential and multithreaded
architectures is libflame. At the top of the stack is Elemental
for distributed memory architectures.

libflame targets roughly the same layer as does LAPACK, and now we
have incorporated the LAPACK code base into libflame. For those
operations where libflame has the native functionality, the LAPACK
code becomes an interface. For all other operations, the netlib
implementation provides that functionality. We affectionately call
this new union "flapack", which offers the following benefits:

1) The libflame implementation of LAPACK is entirely coded in C.
No Fortran libraries or compilers are required.
2) The libflame library builds upon the BLIS interface. This
interface, unlike the BLAS, allows for arbitrary row and column
stride. While some applications may benefit from this (e.g., those
that perform computation with slices of tensors), from a
development and maintainability point of view it allows more
functionality to be supported with less code.
3) The union of the two libraries allows users to benefit from both
the LAPACK and libflame code base, within one package.
4) "flapack" passes the LAPACK test suite on platforms where we
have tested this. (There is one exception of a test case that
involves packed matrices that we believe is not in general use.)

The library is available under a 3-clause BSD license at:
https://github.com/flame/libflame
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