Using PLAPACK--parallel Linear Algebra Package

Book excerpt: This book is a comprehensive introduction to all the components of a high-performance parallel linear algebra library, as well as a guide to the PLAPACK infrastructure. PLAPACK is a library infrastructure for the parallel implementation of linear algebra algorithms and applications on distributed memory supercomputers such as the Intel Paragon, IBM SP2, Cray T3D/T3E, SGI PowerChallenge, and Convex Exemplar. This infrastructure allows library developers, scientists, and engineers to exploit a natural approach to encoding so-called blocked algorithms, which achieve high performance by operating on submatrices and subvectors. This feature, as well as the use of an alternative, more application-centric approach to data distribution, sets PLAPACK apart from other parallel linear algebra libraries, allowing for strong performance and significanltly less programming by the user. This book is a comprehensive introduction to all the components of a high-performance parallel linear algebra library, as well as a guide to the PLAPACK infrastructure. Scientific and Engineering Computation series