Response #1: 2005-09-20

General

1. Is dense linear algebra a performance bottleneck in your applications?
Yes

2. How often do your applications use the arithmetic precisions listed below:

3. What dense matrix sizes are most important or time-consuming for your application?
10s X 10s

4. Does your application come close to, or run out of memory on important problems?
Yes

5. Number of processors used for your application:

6. Which architectures do you use or intend to use in the next three years?
Multi-core-thread, Symmetric-multi-procs, Vector-computers, Distributed-shared-memory, Distributed-memory, Hybrid-shared, Widely-distributed

8. Please rank how the following features would be useful to your current or planned applications?

9. Do your applications solve linear algebra problems of the type?
Linear positive definite systems, Banded linear systems, SVDs

LAPACK Usage

1. Do you use LAPACK (or a vendor version of LAPACK )?
Yes

4. If you use LAPACK, do you use a vendors version or one obtained directly from Netlib?
Vendor, Netlib, Other

5. If you have used both a vendors version of LAPACK and Netlibs, how do the two versions compare?
Higher speed for the vendor's version as expected. Same robustness (keeping in mind that I compile the Netlib version with medium optimization flags).

6. Do your applications make direct LAPACK calls?
Yes

7. Do your applications use libraries which depend on LAPACK?
Yes

8. Do your applications use a higher-level interface to LAPACK?
No

10. Is the LAPACK procedure interface a barrier to more extensive use?
Yes

11. From which languages do you call LAPACK routines?
C, C++, Fortran 77, Fortran 90/95

13. How could the LAPACK interface be improved to feel more natural to your application and implementation language?
A simplified interface for Fortran90 etc. that allows for simple quick use of the routines.

14. If you have installed LAPACK yourself, how could the installation process be improved?
Maybe an ATLAS-like procedure that reduced the optimization levels only on routines that tend to fail on a given arch/compiler combination and optimized the rest.

15. How frequently do you refer to the LAPACK Users Guide?
Frequently

ScaLAPACK Usage

1. Do you use ScaLAPACK (or a vendor version of ScaLAPACK )?
No

2. If you do not use ScaLAPACK, why?
Cost of learning

15. How frequently do you refer to the ScaLAPACK Users Guide?

Targeted Environment Specifics

1. Under which operating system environments do your applications run?
AIX, BSD, HP/UX, IRIX, Linux, Mac OS X, Solaris, Tru64, Unicos, Windows (cygwin)

2. If your applications run in a shared-memory environment, which styles of parallelism do they employ?
Multiple

2a. Please specify any particular libraries of frameworks used?
OpenMP, MPI

3a. Please specify any particular libraries of frameworks used?
MPI