It is currently written in a Single-Program-Multiple-Data style using explicit message passing for interprocessor communication.
It assumes matrices are laid out in a two-dimensional block cyclic decomposition.
As of version 2.0, the code base directly includes PBLAS and BLACS and has dropped support for PVM.
After two decades of operation, a new library was created to replace ScaLAPACK, which was not suitable for modern accelerated architectures.
Slate is written in C++ and was designed primarily to serve as a dense linear algebra library to the United States Department of Energy and to the high-performance computing community at large.