Ho, ho. I've been told by a NAG representative that we should pay them to talk to our own academics who actually do the serious linear algebra! Also I was told they were contracted to do the old AMD proprietary BLAS, which was inferior to OpenBLAS, and has been dropped in favour of BLIS. I don't wish to slight the general quality of their stuff, though. Their Fortran compiler is notable in this context.
You don't get the large scale parallel libraries from NAG anyway.
> We all know what the quality of academic code reputation is.
do 'we'?
considering a huge amount of common numerical software (esp with any kind of fortran lineage whatsoever) is based in some way on netlib.org code that itself was heavily developed in the BSD UNIX on Vax+ARPANET era within the academic/research community, I'm not really sure that, based on this comment, 'we' do..
Writing your own crypto is a bad idea, but in research sometimes the goals of your research require you to become good enough, and by good enough, I mean a notable expert in the "writing your own crypto" equivalent. Which in this case would be something like writing your own linear algebra library functions for research you plan to publish.
but its far cheaper (and has less bugs) that paying some one to write your own.
Same reason that writing your own crypto is a bad idea.