•Industry standard interface(evolving)
•Vendors, others supply optimized implementations
•History
–BLAS1 (1970s):
•vector operations: dot product,
saxpy
•m=2*n, f=2*n, q ~1 or less
–BLAS2 (mid 1980s)
•matrix-vector operations
•m=n^2, f=2*n^2, q~2, less
overhead
•somewhat faster than BLAS1