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Cilk

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Encyclopedia of Parallel Computing

Synonyms

Cilk-1; Cilk-5; Cilk++; Cilkplus

Definition

Cilk (pronounced “silk”) is a linguistic and runtime technology for algorithmic multithreaded programming originally 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; the commercial Cilk++, which extended the Cilk model to C++ and introduced...

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Acknowledgments

Thanks to the many students and postdocs who contributed to Cilk technology over the years. Space does not permit all to be listed. Thanks to the team at Cilk Arts and the new Cilk team at Intel. Special thanks to Matteo Frigo and Bradley C. Kuszmaul, who contributed mightily to developing and maintaining the MIT Cilk codebase. Many thanks to the DARPA and NSF sponsors of this research over the years.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 32 Vassar Street, 02139, Cambridge, MA, USA

    Charles E. Leiserson Dr.

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  1. Charles E. Leiserson Dr.
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Editors and Affiliations

  1. University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Urbana, IL, USA

    David Padua

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Leiserson, C.E. (2011). Cilk. In: Padua, D. (eds) Encyclopedia of Parallel Computing. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-387-09766-4_289

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