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 ...

, OpenBLAS is an open-source implementation of the

BLAS Basic Linear Algebra Subprograms (BLAS) is a specification that prescribes a set of low-level routines for performing common linear algebra operations such as vector addition, scalar multiplication, dot products, linear combinations, and matrix ...

(Basic Linear Algebra Subprograms) and

LAPACK LAPACK ("Linear Algebra Package") is a standard software library for numerical linear algebra. It provides routines for solving systems of linear equations and linear least squares, eigenvalue problems, and singular value decomposition. It als ...

API 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 ...

s with many hand-crafted optimizations for specific

processor Processor may refer to: Computing Hardware * Processor (computing) **Central processing unit (CPU), the hardware within a computer that executes a program *** Microprocessor, a central processing unit contained on a single integrated circuit (I ...

types. It is developed at the Lab of Parallel Software and Computational Science, ISCAS. OpenBLAS adds optimized implementations of linear algebra kernels for several processor architectures, including Intel

Sandy Bridge Sandy Bridge is the codename for Intel's 32 nm microarchitecture used in the second generation of the Intel Core processors (Core i7, i5, i3). The Sandy Bridge microarchitecture is the successor to Nehalem and Westmere microarchitecture. ...

and

Loongson Loongson () is the name of a family of general-purpose, MIPS architecture-compatible microprocessors, as well as the name of the Chinese fabless company (Loongson Technology) that develops them. The processors are alternately called Godson pro ...

. It claims to achieve performance comparable to the Intel MKL: this mostly holds true on the BLAS part, while the LAPACK part falls behind. On machines that support the AVX2 instruction set, OpenBLAS can achieve similar performance to MKL, but there are currently almost no open source libraries comparable to MKL on CPUs with the AVX512 instruction set. OpenBLAS is a fork 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 ...

History and present

OpenBLAS was developed by the parallel software group led by Professor Yunquan Zhang from the Chinese Academy of Sciences. OpenBLAS was initially only for the Loongson CPU platform. Dr. Xianyi Zhang contributed a lot of work. Since GotoBLAS was abandoned, the successor OpenBLAS is now developed as an open source BLAS library for multiple platforms, including X86, ARMv8, MIPS, and RISC-V platforms, and is respected for its excellent portability. The parallel software group is modernizing OpenBLAS to meet current computing needs. For example, OpenBLAS's level-3 computations were primarily optimized for large and square matrices (often considered as regular-shaped matrices). And now irregular-shaped matrix multiplication are also supported, such as tall and skinny matrix multiplication ( TSMM), which supports faster deep learning calculations on the CPU. TSMM is one of the core calculations in deep learning operations. Besides this, the compact function and small GEMM will also be supported by OpenBLAS.

References

External links

* {{Numerical linear algebra Numerical linear algebra Numerical software Software using the BSD license

History and present

See also

References

External links