This section describes Sparse BLAS Level 1, an extension of BLAS Level 1 included in the

Intel® oneAPI

Math Kernel Library

beginning with the

Intel® oneAPI Math Kernel Library

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

)

.