scientific computing Computational science, also known as scientific computing or scientific computation (SC), is a field in mathematics that uses advanced computing capabilities to understand and solve complex problems. It is an area of science that spans many disc ...

, BLIS (BLAS-like Library Instantiation Software) is an

open-source Open source is source code that is made freely available for possible modification and redistribution. Products include permission to use the source code, design documents, or content of the product. The open-source model is a decentralized sof ...

framework for implementing a superset of BLAS (Basic Linear Algebra Subprograms) functionality for specific processor types that was recently awarded the

J. H. Wilkinson Prize for Numerical Software The J. H. Wilkinson Prize for Numerical Software is awarded every four years to honor outstanding contributions in the field of numerical software. The award is named to commemorate the outstanding contributions of James H. Wilkinson in the same ...

. It exposes that functionality through two traditional

Application Programming Interfaces An application programming interface (API) is a way for two or more computer programs to communicate with each other. It is a type of software interface, offering a service to other pieces of software. A document or standard that describes how ...

(APIs): the BLAS interface and the CBLAS interface. BLIS also includes two APIs native to the framework: a typed (BLAS-like) API and an object API. These native interfaces provide access to BLAS-like functionality that is not supported by, but closely related to, operations found in the BLAS (and CBLAS). The framework is developed and supported by the Science of High-Performance Computing (SHPC) group of the Oden

Institute for Computational Engineering and Sciences The Oden Institute for Computational Engineering and Sciences is an interdisciplinary research unit and graduate program at The University of Texas at Austin dedicated to advancing computational science and engineering through a variety of progr ...

The University of Texas at Austin The University of Texas at Austin (UT Austin, UT, or Texas) is a public research university in Austin, Texas Austin is the capital city of the U.S. state of Texas, as well as the county seat, seat and largest city of Travis County, Te ...

and the Matthews Research Group at

Southern Methodist University , mottoeng = " The truth will make you free" , established = , type = Private research university , accreditation = SACS , academic_affiliations = , religious_affiliation = United Methodist Church , president = R. Gerald Turner , pr ...

. BLIS yields high performance on many current CPU microarchitectures in both single-threaded and multithreaded modes of execution. BLIS also offers competitive performance for some cases of matrix multiplication in which one or more matrix operands are unusually skinny and/or small. The framework achieves high performance by employing specialized kernels (typically written in GNU extended inline assembly syntax) along with cache and register blocking through matrix operands. BLIS also works on processors for which custom kernels have not yet been written; in those cases, the framework relies upon portable kernel implementations that perform at a lower rate of computation. BLIS is sometimes described as a refactoring of GotoBLAS2, which was created by Kazushige Goto at the

Texas Advanced Computing Center The Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC) at the University of Texas at Austin, United States, is an advanced computing research center that provides comprehensive advanced computing resources and support services to researchers in Texas and acr ...

References

External links

* {{Numerical linear algebra Numerical linear algebra Numerical software

See also

References

External links