LAPACK was released on February 29, 1992. As the annoucement stated, ``LAPACK is a transportable library of Fortran 77 subroutines for solving the most common problems in numerical linear algebra: systems of linear equations, linear least squares problems, eigenvalue problems, and singular value problems. It has been designed to be efficient on a wide range of modern high-performance computers". LAPACK can be regarded as a successor to LINPACK and EISPACK; it has virtually all their capabilities and much more besides. LAPACK improves on LINPACK and EISPACK in four main aspects: speed, accuracy, robustness, and functionality. It was designed at the outset to exploit the level-3 BLAS.
Development of LAPACK continues under the auspices of two follow-on projects. LAPACK 2 and ScaLAPACK. An object-oriented C++ extension to LAPACK has been produced, called LAPACK++. CLAPACK is C version of LAPACK, converted from the original Fortran version using the f2c converter. ScaLAPACK comprises a subset of LAPACK routines redesigned for distributed memory parallel machines. Other ongoing work includes developing codes that take advantage of the careful rounding and exception handling of IEEE arithmetic.