SLATEC

{{third-party|date=February 2014}}

SLATEC Common Mathematical Library is a FORTRAN 77 library of over 1,400 general purpose mathematical and statistical routines. The code was developed at US government research laboratories and is therefore public domain software.

"SLATEC" is an acronym for the Sandia, Los Alamos, Air Force Weapons Laboratory Technical Exchange Committee, an organization formed in 1974 to foster the exchange of technical information between the computer centers of three US government laboratories.

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.{{cite web|last=Fong|first= Kirby W.|title=Guide to the SLATEC Common Mathematical Library|url=http://www.netlib.org/slatec/guide|publisher=netlib.org|accessdate=13 November 2010|author2=Jefferson, Thomas H. |author3=Suyehiro, Tokihiko |author4= Walton, Lee |date=July 1993}}

The main repository for SLATEC is Netlib.{{Cite web | url=http://www.netlib.org/slatec |title = Slatec}} 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.The file src/changes in the official distribution lists two such corrections, made in 1994 and 1999.

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.GSL design document https://www.gnu.org/software/gsl/design/gsl-design.html#SEC1 as of October 2012.

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:

class="wikitable sortable" style="text-align:center; width:80%;"

|+

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 systemshttp://www.cisl.ucar.edu/css/software/fishpack/, {{cite web |url=http://people.sc.fsu.edu/~jburkardt/f77_src/fishpack/fishpack.html |title=FISHPACK - A Poisson Equation Solver |accessdate=2011-10-11 |url-status=dead |archiveurl=https://web.archive.org/web/20111010184456/http://people.sc.fsu.edu/~jburkardt/f77_src/fishpack/fishpack.html |archivedate=2011-10-10 }}

FNLIB

| 161

|yes, as 'FN'

|special functions

LINPACK

| 128

|yes

|linear algebra, outdatedAs http://www.netlib.org/linpack says, LINPACK is largely superseded by LAPACK.

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

References

{{Reflist}}

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}}