LINPACK is a software

library A library is a collection of Book, books, and possibly other Document, materials and Media (communication), media, that is accessible for use by its members and members of allied institutions. Libraries provide physical (hard copies) or electron ...

for performing numerical

linear algebra Linear algebra is the branch of mathematics concerning linear equations such as :a_1x_1+\cdots +a_nx_n=b, linear maps such as :(x_1, \ldots, x_n) \mapsto a_1x_1+\cdots +a_nx_n, and their representations in vector spaces and through matrix (mathemat ...

on digital computers. It was written in Fortran by Jack Dongarra, Jim Bunch,

Cleve Moler Cleve Barry Moler (born August 17, 1939) is an American mathematician and computer programmer specializing in numerical analysis. In the mid to late 1970s, he was one of the authors of LINPACK and EISPACK, Fortran libraries for numerical compu ...

, and Gilbert Stewart, and was intended for use on

supercomputer A supercomputer is a type of computer with a high level of performance as compared to a general-purpose computer. The performance of a supercomputer is commonly measured in floating-point operations per second (FLOPS) instead of million instruc ...

s in the 1970s and early 1980s. It has been largely superseded by LAPACK, which runs more efficiently on modern architectures. LINPACK makes use of the BLAS (Basic Linear Algebra Subprograms) libraries for performing basic vector and matrix operations. The

LINPACK benchmarks The LINPACK benchmarks are a measure of a system's floating-point computing power. Introduced by Jack Dongarra, they measure how fast a computer solves a dense ''n'' × ''n'' system of linear equations ''Ax'' = ''b'', which i ...

appeared initially as part of the LINPACK user's manual. The parallel LINPACK benchmark implementation called HPL (High Performance Linpack) is used to benchmark and rank supercomputers for the

TOP500 The TOP500 project ranks and details the 500 most powerful non-distributed computing, distributed computer systems in the world. The project was started in 1993 and publishes an updated list of the supercomputers twice a year. The first of these ...

list.

World's most powerful computer by year

References

Benchmarks (computing) Fortran libraries Numerical linear algebra Numerical software {{compu-eng-stub