Naming Conventions for BLAS Routines

Developer Reference for Intel® oneAPI Math Kernel Library for C

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Date 12/16/2022

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Naming Conventions for BLAS Routines

BLAS routine names have the following structure:

<character> <name> <mod> [_64]

The <character> field indicates the data type:

s: real, single precision
c: complex, single precision
d: real, double precision
z: complex, double precision

Some routines and functions can have combined character codes, such as sc or dz.

For example, the function scasum uses a complex input array and returns a real value.

The <name> field, in BLAS level 1, indicates the operation type. For example, the BLAS level 1 routines ?dot, ?rot, ?swap compute a vector dot product, vector rotation, and vector swap, respectively.

In BLAS level 2 and 3, <name> reflects the matrix argument type:

ge: general matrix
gb: general band matrix
sy: symmetric matrix
sp: symmetric matrix (packed storage)
sb: symmetric band matrix
he: Hermitian matrix
hp: Hermitian matrix (packed storage)
hb: Hermitian band matrix
tr: triangular matrix
tp: triangular matrix (packed storage)
tb: triangular band matrix.

The <mod> field, if present, provides additional details of the operation. BLAS level 1 names can have the following characters in the <mod> field:

c: conjugated vector
u: unconjugated vector
g: Givens rotation construction
m: modified Givens rotation
mg: modified Givens rotation construction

BLAS level 2 names can have the following characters in the <mod> field:

mv: matrix-vector product
sv: solving a system of linear equations with a single unknown vector
r: rank-1 update of a matrix
r2: rank-2 update of a matrix.

BLAS level 3 names can have the following characters in the <mod> field:

mm: matrix-matrix product
sm: solving a system of linear equations with multiple unknown vectors
rk: rank-k update of a matrix
r2k: rank-2k update of a matrix.

On 64-bit platforms, BLAS routines with the _64 suffix support large data arrays in the LP64 interface library and enable you to mix integer types in one application. For example, when an application is linked with the LP64 interface library, SGEMM indexes arrays with the 32-bit integer type, while SGEMM_64 indexes arrays with the 64-bit integer type. For more interface library details, see "Using the ILP64 Interface vs. LP64 Interface" in the developer guide.

The examples below illustrate how to interpret BLAS routine names:

`ddot`	`<d> <dot>`: real and double precision, vector-vector dot product
`cdotc`	`<c> <dot> <c>`: complex and single precision, vector-vector dot product, conjugated
`cdotu`	`<c> <dot> <u>`: complex and single precision, vector-vector dot product, unconjugated
`scasum`	`<sc> <asum>`: real and single-precision output, complex and single-precision input, sum of magnitudes of vector elements
`sgemv`	`<s> <ge> <mv>`: real and single precision, general matrix, matrix-vector product
`ztrmm`	`<z> <tr> <mm> _64`: complex and double precision, triangular matrix, matrix-matrix product, 64-bit integer type

Sparse BLAS level 1 naming conventions are similar to those of BLAS level 1. For more information, see Naming Conventions.

Parent topic: BLAS Routines

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Naming Conventions for BLAS Routines