We present the basic principles that underlie the high-performance implementation of the matrix-matrix multiplication that is part of the widely used GotoBLAS library. Design decisions are justified by successively refining a model of architectures with multilevel memories. A simple but effective algorithm for executing this operation results. Implementations on a broad selection of architectures are shown to achieve near-peak performance.

In this paper, we give a straight forward, highly e cient, scalable implementation of common matrix multiplication operations. The algorithms are much simpler than previously published methods, yield better performance, and require less work space. MPI implementations are given, as are p erformance r esults on the Intel Paragon system.

SUMMARYWe discuss the design and high-performance implementation of collective communications operations on distributed-memory computer architectures. Using a combination of known techniques (many of which were first proposed in the 1980s and early 1990s) along with careful exploitation of communication modes supported by MPI, we have developed implementations that have improved performance in most situations compared to those currently supported by public domain implementations of MPI such as MPICH. Performance results from a large Intel Xeon/Pentium 4 (R) processor cluster are included.

The BLAS-like Library Instantiation Software (BLIS) framework is a new infrastructure for rapidly instantiating Basic Linear Algebra Subprograms (BLAS) functionality. Its fundamental innovation is that virtually all computation within level-2 (matrix-vector) and level-3 (matrix-matrix) BLAS operations can be expressed and optimized in terms of very simple kernels. While others have had similar insights, BLIS reduces the necessary kernels to what we believe is the simplest set that still supports the high performance that the computational science community demands. Higher-level framework code is generalized and implemented in ISO C99 so that it can be reused and/or reparameterized for different operations (and different architectures) with little to no modification. Inserting high-performance kernels into the framework facilitates the immediate optimization of any BLAS-like operations which are cast in terms of these kernels, and thus the framework acts as a productivity multiplier. Users of BLAS-dependent applications are given a choice of using the traditional Fortran-77 BLAS interface, a generalized C interface, or any other higher level interface that builds upon this latter API. Preliminary performance of level-2 and level-3 operations is observed to be competitive with two mature open source libraries (OpenBLAS and ATLAS) as well as an established commercial product (Intel MKL).

With the emergence of thread-level parallelism as the primary means for continued performance improvement, the programmability issue has reemerged as an obstacle to the use of architectural advances. We argue that evolving legacy libraries for dense and banded linear algebra is not a viable solution due to constraints imposed by early design decisions. We propose a philosophy of abstraction and separation of concerns that provides a promising solution in this problem domain. The first abstraction, FLASH, allows algorithms to express computation with matrices consisting of contiguous blocks, facilitating algorithms-by-blocks. Operand descriptions are registered for a particular operation a priori by the library implementor. A runtime system, SuperMatrix, uses this information to identify data dependencies between suboperations, allowing them to be scheduled to threads out-of-order and executed in parallel. But not all classical algorithms in linear algebra lend themselves to conversion to algorithms-by-blocks. We show how our recently proposed LU factorization with incremental pivoting and a closely related algorithm-by-blocks for the QR factorization, both originally designed for out-of-core computation, overcome this difficulty. Anecdotal evidence regarding the development of routines with a core functionality demonstrates how the methodology supports high productivity while experimental results suggest that high performance is abundantly achievable.