Yes, specifically to change focus from academic work to being "full time" on OpenBLAS a bit and clean it up as it started getting a lot more traction. Shortly a

Yes, specifically to change focus from academic work to being "full time" on OpenBLAS a bit and clean it up as it started getting a lot more traction. Shortly after completing that he passed on the maintainership of OpenBLAS its growth, but that was how it sat until came along late in 2017 to pick it up from there. This ends up being why a lot of people in the Julia Lab learned the internals and started creating pure Julia BLAS implementations, which continues to this day with things like LoopVectorization.jl and Octavian.jl (though Chris Elrod was not around during that time, so he comes with his own influences)