LAPACK on distributed memory machines

[James W. Demmel]

LAPACK has received additional funding to try to extend the work to
distributed memory machines. It is not at all clear whether the BLAS
based approach will yield adequate performance, but a number of groups
besides LAPACK are currently trying to see whether this is the case.
There will be a workshop held in conjunction with the SIAM COnference
on Parallel PRocessing for Scientific Computing in March to assess
progress so far. We certainly hope this approach will be adequate.
In the meantime, the effort to write BLAS and port LAPACK will make
a large body of useful code available on these machines.

    Jim Demmel
    CS Division and Math Dept.
    U. C. Berkeley