TABLE OF CONTENTS Caveat receptor ... Anything free comes with no guarantee!
- JACK DONGARRA and ERIC GROSSE, Netlib mail header
In this appendix we provide information on how to acquire software mentioned in the book. First, we describe some basic aspects of the Internet.
A huge variety of information and software is available over the Internet, the worldwide combination of interconnected computer networks. The location of a particular object is specified by a URL, which stands for "Uniform Resource Locator". Examples of URLs are
http://www.netlib.org/index.htmlftp://ftp.netlib.org
The first example specifies a World Wide Web server (http = hypertext transfer protocol) together with a file in hypertext format (html = hypertext markup language), while the second specifies an anonymous ftp site. In any URL, the site address may, optionally, be followed by a filename that specifies a particular file. For more details about the Internet see on-line information, or one of the many books on the subject.
Netlib is a repository of freely available mathematical software, documents, and databases of interest to the scientific computing community [350, 1987], [168, 1994]. It includes
research codes,
golden oldies (classic programs that are not available in standard libraries),
the collected algorithms of the ACM,
program libraries such as EISPACK, LINPACK, LAPACK, and MINPACK.
back issues of NA-Digest, a weekly digest for the numerical analysis community,
databases of conferences and performance data for a wide variety of machines.
Netlib also enables the user to download technical reports from certain institutions, to download software...
