On Mon, Feb 27, 2012 at 10:55, Barry Smith <bsmith@mcs.anl.gov> wrote:

I'm afraid the sudden appearance of the blas dot for complex numbers problem is my fault.

Traditionally since 199x we never used the complex dot product from blas because of the return complex type problem. VecDot_Seq() used #ifdef for complex and a simple loop.

Since some blas norm suck I off-hand told Shri to use dot for norm and wasn't thinking the complex case.

Most BLAS implementations don't have great code for BLAS level 1 anyway and it tends to be memory bandwidth limited, so I don't have a problem with using a simple loop.

Since then, of course, the complex dot problem has been coming up.

Maybe it is best to continue to never use complex blas dot and just change the VecNorm_ routines to use norm for complex and not dot.? Just throw away this silly problem and time sink?

I think we should use norm for norm.