
  Welcome to the circle of PROFIL/BIAS users! 
,---------------------------------------------'

What is PROFIL/BIAS
-------------------

  PROFIL/BIAS is a portable C++/C library for developing and implementing
interval algorithms in a comfortable but nevertheless efficient way.

  The C part BIAS provides fast implementations of basic interval vector and
matrix operations in the style of BLAS.

  All interval operations of the C++ part PROFIL are based on BIAS with the
advantage that PROFIL is independent from the internal representation and the
implementation of the interval types. It features data types such as vectors,
matrices, intervals, interval vectors and matrices, and integer vectors and
matrices, as well as operations between these. Additionally lots of commonly
used packages like local and glocal optimization methods, automatic
differentiation, and test matrices are included.

How to get started
------------------

  The installation consists of three steps:

1) First you have to configure the hardware specific part of PROFIL/BIAS. This
is done by running

  ./Configure

in the directory in which you unpacked the PROFIL/BIAS sources. Select your
system from the list and you're done. (For details on the list items please
check the documentation.)

2) Now you're ready to compile PROFIL/BIAS. Just run

  make all

and after that

  make install

You don't need special rights for this, make install just copies the headers and
libraries to the subdirectories include und lib, respectively.

3) [optional but recommended] You can execute some (yet basic) tests of the installation by issuing

  make check

This exercises PROFIL/BIAS's basic functionality. Please let us know if something unexpected happens
here.

Note: Currently there is an open bug in glibc's libm on x86-64. Therefore a WARNING regarding the
      validity of basic function results under rounding mode changes is expected.

4) [optional] There are some example programs for the different parts of
PROFIL/BIAS, these can be compiled with

  make examples

and can afterwards be found in the subdirectories of the parts they exhibit.
These are a good starting point to see how to use the parts in your own programs.

Authors and Contact
-------------------

  PROFIL/BIAS was written by
Olaf Knueppel, Dirk Husung, Christian Keil

  For questions, bug reports, suggestions, and success stories contact 
Christian Keil, c.keil@tu-harburg.de
