Basic Linear Algebra Subprograms (BLAS) is a e facto application programming interface standard for publishing libraries to perform basic linear algebra operations such as vector and matrix multiplication. They were first published in 1979, and are used to build larger packages such as LAPACK. Heavily used in high-performance computing, highly optimized implementations of the BLAS interface have been developed by hardware vendors such as by Intel as well as by other authors (e.g. ATLAS is a portable self-optimizing BLAS). The LINPACK benchmark relies heavily on DGEMM, a BLAS subroutine, for its performance.