HP MLIB User's Guide Vol. 1 7th Ed.

Chapter 2 Basic Vector Operations 31
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
• Hewlett-Packard extensions to the BLAS
• BLAS Standard
The term BLAS, as used in this section, refers to all of the above listed BLAS
and the Hewlett-Packard extensions to the BLAS.
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.