SLATEC is an acronym for the Sandia, Los Alamos, Air Force Weapons Laboratory Technical Exchange Committee. Formed in 1974 to foster exchange among these three New Mexico laboratories, it has since been expanded to include LLNL (both LC and the former NERSC), ORNL, and NIST (the National Institute for Standards and Technology, formerly NBS). On occasion, ANL, NCAR, and other government laboratories have also been involved in SLATEC activities.

The Common Mathematical Library (CML) developed by SLATEC is a portable Fortran 77 library of high quality mathematical software. It includes the widely-known packages BSPLINE, EISPACK, FISHPACK, FNLIB, LINPACK, PCHIP, QUADPACK and much more. (It is very weak in statistical software.)

Routines from this library, being nonproprietary and portable, may be used on both the LC machines and the user's workstation. SLATEC is not installed on LC machines, but you can build the library yourself from source code that you get from LINMath. In fact, since the LINMath sources are more recent and more thoroughly debugged than the installed binaries, Linux users are also encouraged to prefer the LINMath version of all SLATEC routines.

For those who use the SLATEC library, online documentation (comment prologues) for individual user-callable SLATEC routines is available through the LINMath website. For complete documentation, see the Guide to Available Mathematical Software, a cross-index and virtual repository of mathematical and statistical software components of use in computational science and engineering provided by NIST.