8.6.0. BLAS: Basic Linear Algebra Subroutines


This is a full interface to the popular BLAS library (written in FORTRAN). Most functions have a single precision and a double precision form for real and complex numbers. A complex number is represented in Lush as an -idx1- with two elements.



8.6.0.0. Requirements/Installation


Most GNU/Linux distributions include BLAS as part of the lapcak , liblapack or liblapack-devel packages (e.g. lapack-3.0-14.i386.rpm on RedHat 7.3 or liblapack3-3.0-4mdk.i586.rpm and liblapack3-devel-3.0-4mdk.i586.rpm on Mandrake 7.2). Those packages are not generally installed by default and will probably have to be installed manually from RPMs or APT.

If you are on a system without a BLAS/LAPACK package, you can download the FORTRAN source code from http://www.netlib.org/lapack and install the resulting library (e.g. blas_LINUX.a) in /usr/local/lib. If you put blas_XXX.a in a non-standard location, you must tell Lush where you put it by doing:

  (defparameter blas-libblas "yourblaslibrary.a") 

before loading any of the BLAS files into Lush.