Goto Leads to Faster Code

pdoubleya writes "There's an article over at the NY Times (registration required) about Kazushige Goto, the author of the Goto Basic Linear Algebra Subroutines (BLAS, see the wiki); his BLAS implementation is used by 4 of the current 11 fastest computers in the world. Goto is known for painstaking effort in hand-optimizing his routines; in one case, "when computer scientists at the University at Buffalo added Goto BLAS to their Pentium-based supercomputer, the calculating power of the system jumped from 1.5 trillion to 2 trillion mathematical operations per second out of a theoretical limit of 3 trillion." To quote Jack Dongarra, from the University of Tennessee, "I tell them that if they want the fastest they should still turn to Mr. Goto."" Ever get the feeling someone wrote an article merely for the pun?

This certainly is news to me.

[trudyscousin (258684)]

I'd always been told that use of Goto led to a case of the BLAS in my code!

Throwing bricks in glasshouses, anyone?

[trezor (555230)]

Ever get the feeling someone wrote an article merely for the pun?

Good thing the headline didn't contribute to that at all.

His code is more stable than Mr. Bluescreen's

[virtigex (323685)]

Although he also writes fast code, Mr. Bluescreen was criticised for the poor stability of his code.

I failed a coding test because of this guy

[alta (1263)]

It was CIS 150, C++ was the language of the day (pascal before, java after.) I was taking an exam that was all coding. I remember extensive use of GOTO from my commodore days, so I used one in a test (the objective was to code something with as few lines as possible)

I had the shortest working code in the class but the arse hole teacher failed me for it. Said something like "we don't teach goto for a reason. Yeah, it's in the book, but don't ever use it!"

Jerk. I should post his phone number on slashdot ;)

Re:I failed a coding test because of this guy

[CastrTroy (595695)]

Obviously this prof was wrong. If he wanted you to code it in as few lines as possible, then he should have expected everyone's code to be completely unreadable, goto's or not. If he wanted your code to be understandable, then he should have asked to make the code as clear as possible, by using as many lines as you may need.

GOTOs sometimes make the code *more* readable

[randyflood (183756)]

I like everyone else was trained *never* to use the dreaded goto statement. I'll grant that Pascal was more readable than Basic (with unlabeled gotos).

But, sometimes, it is actually better to use a goto to make the code more readable. The Linux Kernel, for example, uses gotos. I was pretty sceptical at first because it had been drilled into my head how unreadable code was with gotos in it. But, reading the code, I have to admitt is is much more readable for exception handeling, for example.

If the goto would not make your code more readable then don't use it. But, in the cases where it would avoid a bunch of sillyness trying to get out of a bunch of nested loops in case some error happened, then it makes a lot of sense.

Linus Torvalds (and others) explain the reasoning for this at:

http://kerneltrap.org/node/553 [kerneltrap.org]

In short, there are both readability and efficiency reasons to use gotos.

This was a test, aimed at slashdot readers...

[Derang() (318404)]

...To see who actually reads the article.

Judging from the replies...not many people ;)

Re:This was a test, aimed at slashdot readers...

[TrappedByMyself (861094)]

Anyone who read more than a few words into it

The calls for the obligatory "You must be new here".

Re:This was a test, aimed at slashdot readers...

[veg_all (22581)]

Anyone who read more than a few words into it would've realized they're talking about a person

Wow. Slashdot article as Turing Test.

That would mean...

[LoyalOpposition (168041)]

Goto Considered Helpful?

-Loyal

Computed goto

[apankrat (314147)]

Not as helpful as computed goto

Seriously. Computed goto is very useful for low-level
optimizations in things like high-throughput ethernet
drivers and such. It basically eliminates conditional
checks in cases where the condition stays the same
for a particular set of data. So instead of

if (context->condition)
      foo(context);
else
      bar(context);

one would have

/* one-time initialization */
if (context->condition)
      context->jmp = &_foo;
else
      context->jmp = &_bar;
 
..
 
goto *context->jmp;
 
for (;;)
{
_foo: foo(context); break;
_bar: bar(context); break;
}

If the second part is executed in a loop, the savings of
not making an IF comparison accumulate fairly quickly.

DEC Math Library

[boa13 (548222)]

DEC had an ultra-optimized math library (calculations on arrays, Fourier transforms, etc.), improved over decades by generations of PhDs. There were different versions of the routines for the different generations of CPUs, for the different cache sizes of a same model, maybe even for various speeds of RAM. Needless to say, the simple fact of linking against that library instead of the standard one improved the speed of math intensive code by a good 10 to 20 percent (those numbers out of my fuzzy memory, but that far from insignificant).

Add to that compilers that were producing top-notch machine language for the target architecture (producing images that ran twice as fast as what gcc gave you at best), CPUs that were spanking the rest of the world as far as floating-point performance was concerned, and you can understand why the scientific community has kept using Alphas for so long.

Where does the slashdot effect come from?

[tehanu (682528)]

A lot of people complain about people never reading the actual articles before they comment, but it seems worse than that. People don't even bother reading the blurbs.

I wonder where the slashdot effect comes from then?

Another punny name

[Riktov (632)]

From the article:
"Robert A. van de Geijin, a computer scientist who works with Mr. Goto at the Texas Center,..."

All right, a Japanese programmer named Goto, working with a non-Japanese guy name Geijin. That's too much.

Well Done Slashdotters

[Linker3000 (626634)]

We have given birth to a new acronym: RPFH Read Past the F**king Headline.

Libgoto is fast but not open-source

[poszi (698272)]

Maybe I should not complain because the guy did a great job and his library is available free of charge but I hesitate to use this library because it is closed-source. I benchmarked it and found it fast and started to use it in my scientific codes. I once found a strange problem in a parallel code I was developing. The program crashed for one specific system I was calculating. It was something weird because it worked for many other systems I tested before. I spent a lot of time trying to find the bug in my program when finally I replaced libgoto with standard blas and the problem disapeared. I knew that the crash was when entering blas but I thought it is because I messed with the arrays that are used as parameters. If libgoto were open-source, I would be able to have a version with debugging info compiled and debug the program and the library. I would probably not fix the bug but I would likely figure out more quickly the problem is in the library and not in my code. After I had known the problem is in libgoto, I dowloaded a new version of libgoto and it worked so the bug has been fixed. There is no changelog on libgoto web page so I don't know what was the problem and how it affacted my previous caclulations.

Atlas [sourceforge.net] is open-source and is a pretty good alternative. It is only a few percent slower than libgoto in most cases.

Re:Libgoto is fast but not open-source

[ufnoise (732845)]

From the article: Some programmers have suggested that Mr. Goto has not joined the open-source movement because he wants to protect his secrets and strategies from competitors. That is not so, he said recently, noting that the Goto BLAS software is freely available for noncommercial use. And he said he was preparing an open-source version.

Re:So my professors were lying?

[/ASCII (86998)]

You might want to read up on this page [reference.com] for some human interaction hints.

Re:goto is obsolete

[fdrake76 (696983)]

Weren't FUNCTIONS invented for the purpose of finally getting rid of goto and labels?

I believe you are referring to Kazushige's cousin, Mr. Gosub.

Re:30%+ Improvement

[Surt (22457)]

Considering the number of scientists who have been looking at this over a number of years, I think it really is a credit to Goto's work. Optimizing at this level is very challenging work on modern processors.

Re:30%+ Improvement

[roystgnr (4015)]

Which is certainly good, but to me says more about the previous implementation than it does about Goto's work.

Yeah, that previous implementation must have totally sucked. I know all my linear algebra software is written around an assembly language core, hand tuned for each new version of a half dozen processors, and designed from the start to minimize TLB misses instead of just naively trying to fit a dataset into L1 or L2 cache. I don't know why those retards at the universities and national labs were ever using anything else!

(closing Slashdot, going back to working on my shamefully unoptimized C++ numerics code...)

Re:30%+ Improvement

[mangu (126918)]

to me says more about the previous implementation than it does about Goto's work

Which only goes to show that you haven't considered the implications of optimization in modern processors. A Pentium 4 can operate above 3 GHz. This means that light can travel no more than 10 centimeters in the duration of one clock pulse. With the spacing in the motherboard, this isn't enough for a pulse to go from the CPU to the RAM and come back. Even if the memory could operate at the same rate as the CPU, the computation would still be limited by light speed alone.

Optimization to get the full advantage of a Pentium 4 doing floating point calculations is one of the most difficult tasks one can do in computing. A P4 can do, in one clock pulse, four multiplications and four additions. To get 100% of this speed one needs to have a sophisticated handling of cache memory, among other requirements.

Re:No you idiots - it's not about GOTO statements

[limabone (174795)]

Oh, Goat-toe hell you spoilsport!

Re:If true...

[SatanicPuppy (611928)]

My favorite ever comment was, "If I ever saw this in the real world, I'd fire you" attached to an "A" test paper with a programming question on it I'd managed to reduce to one line of nearly incomprehensible recursion.

Re:If true...

[scheming daemons (101928)]

Of course GOTO is logical in real life. I experience this all the time:

If wife has headache, GOTO sleep

If boss is on vacation, GOTO strip bar for long lunch

If in-laws are coming over, GOTO work and pretend there is a critical problem that requires your presence all night

If technical conference is in Vegas, GOTO it

loads of examples.

If work is boring, GOTO slashdot to kill an hour or two