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The Cilk Project

Cilk (pronounced "silk") is a linguistic and runtime technology for algorithmic multithreaded programming developed at MIT. The philosophy behind Cilk is that a programmer should concentrate on structuring her or his program to expose parallelism and exploit locality, leaving Cilk's runtime system with the responsibility of scheduling the computation to run efficiently on a given platform. The Cilk runtime system takes care of details like load balancing, synchronization, and communication protocols. Cilk is algorithmic in that the runtime system guarantees efficient and predictable performance. Important milestones in Cilk technology include the original Cilk-1, which provided a provably efficient work-stealing runtime support but little linguistic support; the later Cilk-5, which provided simple linguistic extensions for multithreading to ANSI C; and the commercial Cilk++, which extended the Cilk model to C++ and introduced "reducer hyperobjects" as an efficient means for resolving races on no Cilk is an especially effective platform for programming "irregular" applications such as sparse numerical algorithms, N-body simulations, graph-theory applications, backtracking search, and cache-efficient stencil computations. Using Cilk, our group has developed three world-class chess programs, StarTech, *Socrates, and Cilkchess.

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