establishes an intuitive interface (similar to MATLAB) and broad applicability thanks to generic programming. Sparse BLAS Several extensions to BLAS for handling sparse matrices have been suggested over the course of the library's history; a small set of sparse matrix kernel routines was finally standardized in 2002. Batched BLAS The traditional BLAS functions have been also ported to architectures that support large amounts of parallelism such as GPUs. Here, the traditional BLAS functions provide typically good performance for large matrices. However, when computing e.g., matrix-matrix-products of many small matrices by using the GEMM routine, those architectures show significant performance losses. To address this issue, in 2017 a batched version of the BLAS function has been specified. Taking the GEMM routine from above as an example, the batched version performs the following computation simultaneously for many matrices: The index in square brackets indicates that the operation is performed for all matrices in a stack. Often, this operation is implemented for a strided batched memory layout where all matrices follow concatenated in the arrays , and . Batched BLAS functions can be a versatile tool and allow e.g. a fast implementation of exponential integrators and Magnus integrators that handle long integration periods with many time steps. Here, the matrix exponentiation, the computationally expensive part of the integration, can be implemented in parallel for all time-steps by using Batched BLAS functions. See also List of numerical libraries Math Kernel Library, math library optimized for the Intel architecture; includes BLAS, LAPACK Numerical linear algebra, the type of problem BLAS solves References Further reading J. J. Dongarra, J. Du Croz, S. Hammarling, and R. J. Hanson, Algorithm 656: An extended set of FORTRAN Basic Linear Algebra Subprograms, ACM Trans. Math. Softw., 14 (1988), pp. 18–32. J. J. Dongarra, J. Du Croz, I. S. Duff, and S. Hammarling, A set of Level 3 Basic Linear Algebra Subprograms, ACM Trans. Math. Softw., 16 (1990), pp. 1–17. J. J. Dongarra, J. Du Croz, I. S. Duff, and S. Hammarling, Algorithm 679: A set of Level 3 Basic Linear Algebra Subprograms, ACM Trans. Math. Softw., 16 (1990), pp. 18–28. New BLAS L. S. Blackford, J. Demmel, J. Dongarra, I. Duff, S. Hammarling, G. Henry, M. Heroux, L. Kaufman, A. Lumsdaine, A. Petitet, R. Pozo, K. Remington, R. C. Whaley, An Updated Set of Basic Linear Algebra Subprograms (BLAS), ACM Trans. Math. Softw., 28-2 (2002), pp. 135–151. J. Dongarra, Basic