[ Thanks to Matteo
Frigo for this announcement: ]
I am pleased to announce the availability of Cilk-5.3.
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. This 5.3 release contains the Cilk
compiler, the Cilk runtime system, and example programs.
Cilk has been developed since 1994 at the MIT Laboratory for
Computer Science by Prof. Charles E. Leiserson and his group.
Besides being used for research and teaching, Cilk was the system
used to code the three world-class chess programs *Tech, *Socrates,
and Cilkchess. Over the years, implementations of Cilk have run on
computers ranging from networks of Linux laptops to an 1824-nodes
Intel Paragon.
The current Cilk-5.3 release runs on symmetric multiprocessor (SMP)
machines that support Posix threads, GNU make, and gcc. Cilk-5.3
was developed and tested mainly on GNU/Linux, IRIX, Digital Unix,
and Solaris/SPARC, but porting Cilk to other Unix systems where the
GNU compilation tools are available should be quite easy. You can
also run Cilk-5.3 on uniprocessor machines. This configuration is
useful for program development and debugging, even though you will
not get any parallel speedup.
This release of Cilk is targeted at the computing community at
large, and not only at parallel-computing specialists. We tried to
make Cilk easy to install and to use. If you know the C language,
you should be able to write simple parallel Cilk programs
quickly.
To download Cilk-5.3 and for up-to-date information, please visit
the Cilk web page at
http://supertech.lcs.mit.edu/cilk
Regards,
Matteo Frigo