24 Aug
2021
24 Aug
'21
3:27 p.m.
On Tue, 2021-08-24 at 11:11 -0700, Chuck Guzis via cctalk wrote:
On 8/24/21 10:40 AM, Van Snyder via cctalk wrote:
I was at the first Supercomputing conference at the Westin Bonaventure
Hotel in Los Angeles, with two of the four authors of the first BLAS
paper -- Charles Lawson and Fred Krogh. Fred asked the PR flack for
SAXPY whether he knew the origin of his company's name. He did not.
Richard Hanson had recently moved from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory to
Sandia National Laboratory in Albuquerque. I lost track of Dave
Kincaid. Sadly, Lawson and Hanson have passed away.
That's the BLAS SAXPY (or DAXPY) routine, a
fundamental step in
Gaussian elimination.
Speaking of which, do any specimens of the Saxpy Matrix-1 still
exist?
Saxpy Computer was a brief flash in the supercomputing universe; fell
onto bad times when a former employee was caught selling secrets to
the
Soviets.?? Afterward, the company went into bankruptcy, if memory
serves, sometime in the 1980s.
SAXPY was a program in the LINPACK suite, and well known to FORTRAN
benchmarkers.? Ref:
http://www.netlib.org/lapack/explore-3.1.1-html/saxpy.f.html? Since
LINPACK could well mean the difference between a sale and a "thanks
for
trying", it received a lot of attention.
--Chuck