Are There Iterative BLAS?

A technique for optimizing software is proposed that involves the use of a standardized set of computational kernels that are common to many iterative methods for solving large sparse linear systems of equations. These kernels, referred to as "Iterative Basic Linear Algebra Subprograms" or "Iterative BLAS", are defined and techniques for their optimization on vector computers are presented. Several sparse matrix storage formats for different classes of matrix problems are proposed that allow the vectorization of fundamental operations in various iterative methods using these kernels. 1 Introduction Many iterative methods perform operations that can be easily optimized on most vector computers, such as the dot product of two vectors and the updating of a vector using another vector. These operations are often used in linear algebra applications, and they have been denoted as Basic Linear Algebra Subprograms or BLAS [23]. In the BLAS library, the calling sequences of these primitive vec..