Prospectus for the Next LAPACK and ScaLAPACK Libraries: Basic ALgebra LIbraries for Sustainable Technology with Interdisciplinary Collaboration (BALLISTIC)

The convergence of several unprecedented changes, including formidable new system design constraints and revolutionary levels of heterogeneity, has made it clear that much of the essential software infrastructure of computational science and engineering is, or will soon be, obsolete. Math libraries have historically been in the vanguard of software that must be adapted first to such changes, both because these low-level workhorses are so critical to the accuracy and performance of so many different types of applications, and because they have proved to be outstanding vehicles for finding and implementing solutions to the problems that novel architectures pose. Under the Basic ALgebra LIbraries for Sustainable Technology with Interdisciplinary Collaboration (BALLISTIC) project, the principal designers of the Linear Algebra PACKage (LAPACK) and the Scalable Linear Algebra PACKage (ScaLAPACK), the combination of which is abbreviated Sca/LAPACK, aim to enhance and update these libraries for the ongoing revolution in processor architecture, system design, and application requirements by incorporating them into a layered package of software components—the BALLISTIC ecosystem—that provides users seamless access to state-of-the-art solver implementations through familiar and improved Sca/LAPACK interfaces.