LAPACK Working Note 94: A User''s Guide to the BLACS v1.0

The BLACS (Basic Linear Algebra Communication Subprograms) project is an ongoing investigation whose purpose is to create a linear algebra oriented message passing interface that is implemented e ciently and uniformly across a large range of distributed memory platforms. The length of time required to implement e cient distributed memory algorithms makes it impractical to rewrite programs for every new parallel machine. The BLACS exist in order to make linear algebra applications both easier to program and more portable. It is for this reason that the BLACS are used as the communication layer for the ScaLAPACK project, which involves implementing the LAPACK library on distributed memory MIMD machines. This report describes the library which has arisen from this project. This work was supported in part by DARPA and ARO under contract number DAAL03-91-C-0047, and in part by the National Science Foundation Science and Technology Center Cooperative Agreement No. CCR-8809615. Dept. of Computer Sciences, Univ. of TN, Knoxville, TN 37996, and Mathematical Sciences Section, ORNL, Oak Ridge, TN 37831, dongarra@cs.utk.edu Dept. of Computer Sciences, Univ. of TN, Knoxville, TN 37996, rwhaley@cs.utk.edu

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