Guide and Reference

What's New for ESSL for AIX

This section summarizes all the changes made to ESSL for AIX.

What's New for ESSL Version 3

• ESSL for AIX provides two new run-time libraries:

  • The ESSL Symmetric Multi-Processing (SMP) Library provides thread-safe versions of the ESSL subroutines for use on the RS/6000 SMP (for example, 604 or 604e) processors. In addition, a subset of these subroutines are also multithreaded versions; that is, they support the shared memory parallel processing programming model. You do not have to change your existing application programs that call ESSL to take advantage of the increased performance of using the SMP processors. You can simply re-link your existing programs. For a list of the multithreaded subroutines in the ESSL SMP Library, see Table 21.

  • The ESSL Thread-Safe Library provides thread-safe versions of the ESSL subroutines for use on all RS/6000 processors. You may use this library to develop your own multithreaded applications.

    If your existing application program calls ESSL, you only need to re-link your program to take advantage of the increased performance of the ESSL SMP Library or to use the ESSL Thread-Safe Library.

• ESSL provides new subroutines (_GETRF and _GETRS), bringing the total number of subroutines to 458.

• For those ESSL subroutines that require extra working storage to perform computations, ESSL now provides a way to dynamically allocate storage when it does not need to persist after the subroutine call. See "Using Auxiliary Storage in ESSL".

• The files for the Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) version of the ESSL Version 3 Guide and Reference are packaged with the ESSL product.

• All the ESSL messages are provided in an ESSL message catalog.