1The BLAS (Basic Linear Algebra Subprograms) are high quality "building block" 2routines for performing basic vector and matrix operations. Level 1 BLAS do 3vector-vector operations, Level 2 BLAS do matrix-vector operations, and Level 43 BLAS do matrix-matrix operations. Because the BLAS are efficient, portable, 5and widely available, they're commonly used in the development of high quality 6linear algebra software -- LINPACK and LAPACK, for example. 7 8The original Fortran77 reference implementation of the BLAS is located in the 9blas directory of Netlib. However, this port uses the updated sources 10distributed with LAPACK. 11