•a library of subroutines designed to provide efficient computation of commonly-used linear algebra routines, like dot products, matrix-vector multiplies, and matrix-matrix multiplies.
•The naming convention is not unlike other libraries - the fist letter indicates precision, the
rest gives a hint (maybe) of
what the routine does, e.g. SAXPY,
DGEMM.
•The BLAS are divided into 3 levels: vector-vector, matrix-vector, and matrix-matrix. The biggest speed-up usually in level 3.