gemm

GEMM, short for General Matrix Multiply, is a fundamental routine in linear algebra and a core operation in the BLAS (Basic Linear Algebra Subprograms) library. It computes a matrix-matrix product with scaling and accumulation, according to the formula C = alpha * op(A) * op(B) + beta * C, where A, B, and C are matrices, alpha and beta are scalars, and op(X) denotes X, its transpose, or its conjugate transpose for complex matrices.

Dimensions and variants: If op(A) is m-by-k and op(B) is k-by-n, then C must be m-by-n. For real matrices, op(A) and op(B) are typically A or A^T, while for complex matrices they may also be conjugate-transposed (A^H and B^H). The operation thus covers multiple variants depending on transposition flags and data types.

Performance characteristics: GEMM performs roughly 2*m*n*k floating-point operations, making it highly compute-bound on modern hardware. Efficient implementations emphasize cache-friendly blocking (tiling), SIMD vectorization, and parallel execution. Numerous architecture-specific micro-kernels optimize for peak performance.

Implementations and usage: GEMM is provided by BLAS-compatible libraries such as OpenBLAS, ATLAS, Intel MKL, cuBLAS, and Apple Accelerate. It serves as a building block for a wide range of linear algebra routines and is central to algorithms in scientific computing, graphics, and machine learning. Different data types have specialized routines, such as sgemm/dgemm for real single/double precision and cgemm/zgemm for complex data.

Summary: As a standard, high-performance primitive, GEMM underpins much of numerical computation, enabling efficient large-scale matrix multiplications across diverse applications and hardware platforms.