Overview
2 Basic Vector Operations
Overview
This chapter explains how to use the VECLIB vector subprograms that serve as building blocks for many user programs. It describes subprograms for performing dense and sparse vector operations. This set of VECLIB subprograms includes:
•Basic Linear Algebra Subprograms
•Sparse BLAS
•
•BLAS Standard
The term BLAS, as used in this section, refers to all of the above listed BLAS and the
BLAS standardization efforts, supported by software and hardware vendors and university groups, began with a BLAS Technical (BLAST) Forum meeting in November 1995 at the University of Tennessee. The efforts of the BLAST Forum resulted in a BLAS Standard specification in 1999.
HP MLIB 8.5 supports a subset of the BLAS Standard routines. This chapter describes dense and banded BLAS Standard functionality in “BLAS Standard routines” on page 152.
This section discusses commonly used or computationally expensive operations of linear algebra. Even though you can code most of these operations in fewer than 10 lines of Fortran or C, using VECLIB subprograms can improve program performance as well as program modularity and readability. However, in some situations, you can achieve better computational performance by entering Fortran or C code than by calling one of these subprograms.
Chapter 2 Basic Vector Operations 31