Cilk FAQ - Section 1
Introduction and General Information
Cilk is a language for multithreaded parallel programming based on
ANSI C. Cilk is designed for general-purpose parallel programming,
but it is especially effective for exploiting dynamic, highly
asynchronous parallelism, which can be difficult to write in
data-parallel or message-passing style. Cilk has been developed since
1994 by the Supercomputing Technologies Group at the MIT Laboratory
for Computer Science. Cilk has been used for research, teaching, and
for coding applications such as a virus shell assembly simulator and
three chess programs.
Official versions of Cilk can be found at
the Cilk web page
We briefly used SourceForge, but they don't know how to stop SPAM, and
eventually gave up.
Yes. Look for Cilk at SourceForge (www.sourceforge.net). Three mailing lists exist:
Starting with version 5.3, Cilk is Free Software in the technical
sense defined by the Free Software Foundation (see
Categories of Free and Non-Free Software), and is distributed under the terms of the GNU General Public License. Previous versions of Cilk were
distributed without fee for noncommercial use, but were not
technically ``free.''
The current Cilk-5.3 system runs on systems that support
POSIX threads. In particular, Cilk has been installed
successfully on GNU/Linux, Solaris, IRIX, Digital Unix, and MacOS X.
Cilk requires certain system software in order to run. In particular,
it requires a recent gcc, GNU make, and preferably the GNU linker.
GNU/Linux systems are usually distributed with all these tools. Cilk
should also work on other systems (*BSD etc.) whenever the appropriate
tools are installed. If you successfully compile Cilk on these
systems, please contact me bradley@mit.edu
so that I can update this FAQ.
Cilk-5.3 supports IA-32 (x86), IA-64 (Itanium), AMD64 (x86-64)
PowerPC, SPARC, MIPS, and Alpha processors. Porting to other
processors is not difficult. Please contact
cilk-support@lists.sourceforge.net
if you are interested in running Cilk on other machines.
Cilk-5.3 does not run on distributed-memory machines. Keith Randall
wrote a distributed-memory variant of Cilk-5.1 as part of his
Ph. D. thesis. See the Cilk web page for a copy of the thesis and for downloading the distributed-memory Cilk version. Be
warned that this version is experimental and it has not been updated
in a long time.
Please do not send questions about Windows NT to the cilk-support
mailing list, because the Cilk maintainer does not know anything about
this system.
Cilkchess is a chess program written in Cilk. Cilkchess and Cilk are
two distinct things. Cilkchess has never been released, and it is not
part of the Cilk distribution. For more information about Cilkchess,
contact its author Don Dailey drd@supertech.lcs.mit.edu
.
Next: Installing Cilk.
Return to contents.
Bradley C. Kuszmaul / bradley@mit.edu
- 27 January 2013
Extracted from Cilk Frequently Asked Questions with Answers,
Copyright © 2013 Bradley C. Kuszmaul.