Implementing Level-3 BLAS with BLIS: Early Experience FLAME Working Note #69

BLIS is a new software framework for instantiating high-performance BLAS-like dense linear algebra libraries. We demonstrate how BLIS acts as a productivity multiplier by using it to implement the level-3 BLAS on a variety of current architectures. The systems for which we demonstrate the framework include state-of-the-art general purpose, low-power, and special purpose architectures. We show how, with very little effort, the BLIS framework yields sequential and parallel implementations that are competitive with the performance of ATLAS, OpenBLAS (an effort to maintain and extend the GotoBLAS), and commercial vendor implementations such as AMD’s ACML, IBM’s ESSL, and Intel’s MKL libraries. While most of this paper focuses on single core implementation, we also provide compelling results that suggest the framework’s leverage extends to the multithreaded domain.