Abstract
This paper describes the widely used ATLAS (Automatically Tuned Linear Algebra Software) project as it stands today. ATLAS is an instantiation of a paradigm in high performance library production and maintenance, which we term AEOS (Automated Empirical Optimization of Software); this style of library management has been created to allow software to keep pace with the incredible rate of hardware advancement inherent in Moore’s Law. ATLAS is the application of this AEOS paradigm to dense linear algebra software. ATLAS produces a full BLAS (Basic Linear Algebra Subprograms) library as well as provides some optimized routines for LAPACK (Linear Algebra PACKage). This paper overviews the basics of what ATLAS is and how it works, highlights some of the recent improvements available as of version 3.9.23, in addition to discussing some of the current challenges and future work.
This work was supported in part by the National Science Foundation, grants NSF CRI CNS-0551504 and NSF HECURA CCF-0833203
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution.
Buying options
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Learn about institutional subscriptionsNotes
- 1.
∗ This work was supported in part by the National Science Foundation, grants NSF CRI CNS-0551504 and NSF HECURA CCF-0833203.
References
Andersen BS, Gustavson FG, Wasniewski J (2000) A recursive formulation of cholesky factorization of a matrix in packed storage. Technical Report UT CS-00-448, LAPACK Working Note No. 146, University of Tennessee
Anderson E, Bai Z, Bischof C, Demmel J, Dongarra J, Du Croz J, Greenbaum A, Hammarling S, McKenney A, Ostrouchov S, Sorensen D (1999) LAPACK users’ guide, 3rd edn. SIAM, Philadelphia, PA
Baradaran N, Chame J, Chen C, Diniz P, Hall M, Lee Y-J, Liu B, Lucas R (2003) Eco: An empirical-based compilation and optimization system. In: International parallel and distributed processing symposium, 2003
Bilmes J, Asanović K, Chin CW, Demmel J (1997) Optimizing matrix multiply using PHiPAC: a portable, high-performance, ANSI C coding methodology. In: Proceedings of the ACM SIGARC international conference on superComputing, Vienna, Austria, July 1997
Blackford LS, Demmel J, Dongarra J, Duff I, Hammarling S, Henry G, Heroux M, Kaufman L, Lumsdaine A, Petitet A, Pozo R, Remington K, Whaley RC (2002) An updated set of basic linear algebra subprograms (BLAS). ACM Trans Math Software 28(2):135–151
Blackford S, Corliss G, Demmel J, Dongarra J, Duff I, Hammarling S, Henry G, Heroux M, Hu C, Kahan W, Kaufman L, Kearfott B, Krogh F, Li X, Maany Z, Petitet A, Pozo R, Remington K, Walster W, Whaley C, Wolff J, Gudenberg V (1999) Document for the basic linear algebra subprograms (BLAS) standard: BLAS technical forum. http://www.netlib.org/cgi-bin/checkout/blast/blast.pl
Castaldo AM, Whaley RC (2009) Minimizing startup costs for performance-critical threading. In: Proceedings of the IEEE international parallel and distributed processing symposium, Rome, Italy, May 2009
Castaldo AM, Whaley RC (2010) Scaling LAPACK panel operations using parallel cache assignment. In: 15th ACM SIGPLAN annual symposium on principles and practice of parallel programming, Bangalore, India, Jan 2010
Dayde M, Duff I, Petitet A (1994) A parallel block implementation of level 3 BLAS for MIMD vector processors. ACM Trans Math Software 20(2):178–193
Diniz P, Lee Y-J, Hall M, Lucas R (2004) A case study using empirical optimization for a large, engineering application. In: International parallel and distributed processing symposium, 2004. CD-ROM Proceedings
Dongarra J, Du Croz J, Duff I, Hammarling S (1990) A set of level 3 basic linear algebra subprograms. ACM Trans Math Software 16(1):1–17
Dongarra J, Du Croz J, Hammarling S, Hanson R (1988) Algorithm 656: an extended set of basic linear algebra subprograms: model implementation and test programs. ACM Trans Math Software 14(1):18–32
Dongarra J, Du Croz J, Hammarling S, Hanson R (1988) An extended set of FORTRAN basic linear algebra subprograms. ACM Trans Math Software 14(1):1–17
Elmroth E, Gustavson F (2000) Applying recursion to serial and parallel qr factorization leads to better performance. IBM J Res Dev 44(4):605–624
Frigo M, Johnson S (1998) FFTW: an adaptive software architecture for the FFT. In: Proceedings of the international conference on acoustics, speech, and signal processing (ICASSP), vol 3, p 1381
Frigo M, Johnson SG (1997) The fastest fourier transform in the west. Technical Report MIT-LCS-TR-728, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Gustavson F (1997) Recursion leads to automatic variable blocking for dense linear-algebra algorithms. IBM J Res Dev 41(6):737–755
Gustavson F, Henriksson A, Jonsson I, Kågström B, Ling P (1998) Recursive blocked data formats and blas’s for dense linear algebra algorithms. In: Kågström B, Dongarra J, Elmroth E, Waśniewski J (eds) Applied parallel computing, PARA’98, Lecture notes in computer science, No. 1541, pp 195–206
Gustavson F, Henriksson A, Jonsson I, Kågström B, Ling P (1998) Superscalar gemm-based level 3 blas – the on-going evolution of a portable and high-performance library. In: Kågström B, Dongarra J, Elmroth E, Waśniewski J (eds) Applied parallel computing, PARA’98, Lecture Notes in Computer Science, No. 1541, pp 207–215
Hanson R, Krogh F, Lawson C (1973) A proposal for standard linear algebra subprograms. ACM SIGNUM Newsl 8(16)
Kågström B, Ling P, van Loan C (1995) GEMM-based level 3 BLAS: high-performance model implementations and performance evaluation benchmark. Technical Report UMINF 95-18, Department of Computing Science, Umeå University
Kågström B, Ling P, van Loan C (1998) Gemm-based level 3 blas: High performance model implementations and performance evaluation benchmark. ACM Trans Math Software 24(3):268–302
Kågström B, Ling P, van Loan C (1998) Gemm-based level 3 blas: High performance model implementations and performance evaluation benchmark. ACM Trans Math Software 24(3):268–302
Kisuki T, Knijnenburg PMW, O’Boyle MFP, Bodin F, Wijshoff HAG (1999) A feasibility study in iterative compilation. In: ISHPC, pp 121–132
Lawson C, Hanson R, Kincaid D, Krogh F (1979) Basic linear algebra subprograms for fortran usage. ACM Trans Math Software 5(3):308–323
Moura JMF, Johnson J, Johnson RW, Padua D, Prasanna V, Pschel M, Veloso MM (1998) Spiral: automatic library generation and platform-adaptation for dsp algorithms. http://www.ece.cmu.edu/~spiral
Pouchet L-N, Bastoul C, Cohen A, Vasilache N (2007) Iterative optimization in the polyhedral model: Part i, one-dimensional time. In: Code generation and optimization, 2007. CGO ’07. international symposium on, pp 144–156, Mar 2007
Pushel M, Moura J, Johnson J, Padua D, Veloso M, Singer B, Xiong J, Frenchetti F, Cacic A, Voronenko Y, Chen K, Johnson R, Rizzolo N (2005) Spiral: code generation for dsp transforms. In: Proceedings of the IEEE, 93(2). special issue on “Program generation, optimization, and adaptation”
See page for details. FFTW homepage. http://www.fftw.org/
See page for details. SPIRAL homepage. http://www.spiral.net/
Tiwari A, Chen C, Chame J, Hall M, Hollingsworth JK (2009) A scalable autotuning framework for compiler optimization. In: Proceedings of the IEEE international parallel and distributed processing symposium, Rome, Italy, May 2009
Toledo S (1997) Locality of reference in lu decomposition with partial pivoting. SIAM J Matrix Anal Appl 18(4)
van der Mark P, Rohou E, Bodin F, Chamski Z, Eisenbeis C (1999) Using iterative compilation for managing software pipeline – unrolling tradoffs. In: SCOPES99, St. Goar, Germany
Vuduc R, Demmel JW, Yelick KA (2005) OSKI: A library of automatically tuned sparse matrix kernels. In: Proceedings of SciDAC 2005, Journal of Physics: Conference Series, San Francisco, CA, USA, vol 16, pp 521–530
Whaley RC User contribution to atlas. http://math-atlas.sourceforge.net/devel/atlas_contrib/ also available in ATLAS/doc/atlas_contrib.pdf of tarfile
Whaley RC (2008) Empirically tuning lapack’s blocking factor for increased performance. In: Proceedings of the international multiconference on computer science and information technology, Wisla, Poland, October 2008
Whaley RC, Castaldo AM (2008) Achieving accurate and context-sensitive timing for code optimization. Software Pract Exp 38(15):1621–1642
Whaley RC, Dongarra J (1997) Automatically Tuned Linear Algebra Software. Technical Report UT-CS-97-366, University of Tennessee, Dec 1997. http://www.netlib.org/lapack/lawns/lawn131.ps
Whaley RC, Dongarra J (1998) Automatically tuned linear algebra software. In: SuperComputing 1998: high performance networking and computing, San Antonio, TX, USA, 1998. CD-ROM Proceedings. Winner, best paper in the systems category http://www.cs.utsa.edu/~whaley/papers/atlas_sc98.ps
Whaley RC, Dongarra J (1999) Automatically Tuned Linear Algebra Software. In: Ninth SIAM conference on parallel processing for scientific computing. CD-ROM Proceedings
Whaley RC, Petitet A Atlas homepage. http://math-atlas.sourceforge.net/
Whaley RC, Petitet A (2005) Minimizing development and maintenance costs in supporting persistently optimized BLAS. Software Pract Exp 35(2):101–121. http://www.cs.utsa.edu/~whaley/papers/spercw04.ps
Whaley RC, Petitet A, Dongarra JJ (2001) Automated empirical optimization of software and the ATLAS project. Parallel Comput 27(1–2):3–35
Whaley RC, Whalley DB (2005) Tuning high performance kernels through empirical compilation. In: The 2005 international conference on parallel processing, pp 89–98, Oslo, Norway, June 2005
Yi Q, Qasem A (2008) Exploring the Optimization Space of Dense Linear Algebra Kernels. In: ACM SIGPLAN symposium on library-centric software design, Aug 2008
Yi Q, Whaley RC (2007) Automated transformation for performance-criticial kernels. In: ACM SIGPLAN symposium on library-centric software design, Montreal, Canada, Oct 2007
Yotov K, Li X, Ren G, Garzaran M, Padua D, Pingali K, Stodghill P (2005) A comparison of empirical and model-driven optimization. Proceedings of the IEEE, 93(2). special issue on “Program Generation, Optimization, and Adaptation”
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2011 Springer New York
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Whaley, R.C. (2011). ATLAS Version 3.9: Overview and Status. In: Naono, K., Teranishi, K., Cavazos, J., Suda, R. (eds) Software Automatic Tuning. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4419-6935-4_2
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4419-6935-4_2
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, New York, NY
Print ISBN: 978-1-4419-6934-7
Online ISBN: 978-1-4419-6935-4
eBook Packages: EngineeringEngineering (R0)