This section describes Sparse BLAS Level 1, an extension of BLAS Level 1 included in the Intel® Math Kernel Library beginning with the Intel MKL release 2.1. Sparse BLAS Level 1 is a group of routines and functions that perform a number of common vector operations on sparse vectors stored in compressed form.
Sparse vectors are those in which the majority of elements are zeros. Sparse BLAS routines and functions are specially implemented to take advantage of vector sparsity. This allows you to achieve large savings in computer time and memory. If nz is the number of non-zero vector elements, the computer time taken by Sparse BLAS operations will be O(nz).
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