At 05:12 PM 11/5/01 -0500, you wrote: G4's beast No, it is the desdendant of it; in its latest reincarnation, for example, all inner routines were recoded to take advantage of the fact that in modern systems cache hit ratio pretty much determines what the final speed will be. Tests are made to find out the optimal inner buffer size (i.e. cache) and routines then use optimal data block sizes for the cache size. IT used to be Eispack (yes, the scope was much narrower for this one). Then Linpack. Now IT is Lapack, at least for dense systems; for sparse numerical linear algebra, there is a plethora of packages. Matlab challenge question: what does the dongarra(n) function compute? This is an undocumented function in matlab. (Jack Dongarra has been one of the pivotal personalities behind these public domain numerical linear algebra packages). -------------------------------------------------------------- Carlos E. Murillo-Sanchez carlos_murillo(a)nospammers.ieee.org