The SLATEC Common Mathematical Library is a FORTRAN 77 collection of over 1,400 general-purpose mathematical and statistical routines developed at US government research labs, making it public domain software. The name "SLATEC" is an acronym representing the Sandia, Los Alamos, and Air Force Weapons Laboratory Technical Exchange Committee, established in 1974 to promote technical information sharing among these US government computer centers.
Project history and current status
In 1977, the SLATEC Common Mathematical Library (CML) Subcommittee decided to construct a library of FORTRAN subprograms to provide portable, non-proprietary, mathematical software that could be used on a variety of computers, including supercomputers, at the three sites. The computers centers of the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, the National Bureau of Standards and the Oak Ridge National Laboratory also participated from 1980–81 onwards.1
The main repository for SLATEC is Netlib.2 The current version is 4.1 (July 1993). Since then, a very small number of minor corrections has been made without incrementing the version number.3
The GNU Scientific Library (GSL), initiated in 1996 and stable since 2001, was started with the explicit aim to provide a more modern replacement for SLATEC.4
Contents
Each subroutine in SLATEC is tagged as belonging to one of 13 subpackages. Some of these subpackages are also well known as free-standing FORTRAN subprogram libraries, including BLAS, EISPACK, FFTPACK, LINPACK and QUADPACK. The following table shows all subpackages and the number of subroutines they contain:
| subpackage | number of routines | separately available in Netlib | purpose |
|---|---|---|---|
| BLAS | 114 | yes | basic linear algebra |
| DASSL | 16 | no | solve differential/algebraic equation systems |
| DEPAC | 10 | no | solve ordinary differential equations (Runge–Kutta methods and similar) |
| EISPACK | 71 | yes | eigenvalues and eigenvectors |
| FFTPACK | 48 | yes | fast Fourier transform |
| FISHPACK | 19 | yes | use cyclic reduction to directly solve second- and fourth-order finite difference approximations to separable elliptic Partial Differential Equations in various coordinate systems5 |
| FNLIB | 161 | yes, as 'FN' | special functions |
| LINPACK | 128 | yes | linear algebra, outdated6 |
| PCHIP | 41 | no | piecewise cubic Hermite interpolation |
| QUADPACK | 59 | yes | numerical integration of one-dimensional functions |
| SDRIVE | 36 | no | solve ordinary differential equations |
| SLAP | 124 | yes | sparse linear algebra package |
| XERROR | 17 | no | error handling |
Further reading
- Walter H. Vandevender, Karen H. Haskell, The SLATEC mathematical subroutine library, ACM SIGNUM Newsletter, Volume 17 Issue 3, September 1982 doi:10.1145/1057594.1057595
External links
References
Fong, Kirby W.; Jefferson, Thomas H.; Suyehiro, Tokihiko; Walton, Lee (July 1993). "Guide to the SLATEC Common Mathematical Library". netlib.org. Retrieved 13 November 2010. http://www.netlib.org/slatec/guide ↩
"Slatec". http://www.netlib.org/slatec ↩
The file src/changes in the official distribution lists two such corrections, made in 1994 and 1999. ↩
GSL design document https://www.gnu.org/software/gsl/design/gsl-design.html#SEC1 as of October 2012. https://www.gnu.org/software/gsl/design/gsl-design.html#SEC1 ↩
http://www.cisl.ucar.edu/css/software/fishpack/, "FISHPACK - A Poisson Equation Solver". Archived from the original on 2011-10-10. Retrieved 2011-10-11. http://www.cisl.ucar.edu/css/software/fishpack/ ↩
As http://www.netlib.org/linpack says, LINPACK is largely superseded by LAPACK. http://www.netlib.org/linpack ↩