  Asymmetric processors have emerged as an appealing technology for severely
energy-constrained environments, especially in the mobile market where
heterogeneity in applications is mainstream. In addition, given the growing
interest on ultra low-power architectures for high performance computing, this
type of platforms are also being investigated in the road towards the
implementation of energy- efficient high-performance scientific applications.
In this paper, we propose a first step towards a complete implementation of the
BLAS interface adapted to asymmetric ARM big.LITTLE processors, analyzing the
trade-offs between performance and energy efficiency when compared to existing
homogeneous (symmetric) multi-threaded BLAS implementations. Our experimental
results reveal important gains in performance while maintaining the energy
efficiency of homogeneous solutions by efficiently exploiting all the resources
of the asymmetric processor.
