Discussion abstract.

The BLAS Technical Forum is having its next meeting at SGI/Cray Research in Minneapolis from April 27th to 29th. It is hoped that a document describing the "new" BLAS can be finalized within two or three more meetings and that the proposed standards will be adopted widely. Since both dense and sparse BLAS are heavily used by the iterative methods community, we feel that this is a good opportunity to discuss these issues and provide input to the ongoing discussions.

The main aspects that the Forum is considering are: parallel BLAS, functional extensions to the existing dense BLAS, mixed precision BLAS, C, C++ and F90 bindings, and sparse BLAS.

The sparse BLAS are organized at two levels, a User Level that has a simple and standardized interface, and a Toolkit level that implements the kernels for a specific data structure.

Although this is a discussion session that will primarily rely on comments and contributions from the floor, the organizers will introduce the topic. Any attendee is welcome to present a prepared contribution and, to facilitate the scheduling of the evening, prospective contributors should contact Mike Heroux or Iain Duff .