This directory contains Cilk, 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 release contains the Cilk compiler, the Cilk runtime system, and example programs.
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.
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-5.4 release runs on symmetric multiprocessor (SMP) machines that support Posix threads, GNU make, and gcc. Cilk-5.4 was developed and tested mainly on GNU/Linux, but porting Cilk to other Unix systems where the GNU compilation tools are available should be quite easy. You can also run Cilk-5.4 on uniprocessor machines. This configuration is useful for program development and debugging, even though you will not get any parallel speedup.
The doc/ directory contains the Cilk manual. The cilk2c/ and runtime/ directories contain the Cilk compiler and runtime system, respectively. The examples/ directory contains example programs.
In order to run Cilk, you need the following packages:
- A recent version of gcc. Cilk-5.4 was tested with
gcc-2.95,gcc-2.8.x,gcc-4.7.3andegcs-1.1.gcc-2.7.xdoes not work. - An implementation of POSIX threads. Cilk-5.4 was tested with LinuxThreads (glibc-2.1) on linux/386 and linux/powerpc, Solaris 2.6, and IRIX 6.5.
- A recent version of GNU
make. GNUmake3.81 is known to work. - The GNU linker is desirable (although not required). Cilk can be compiled as a shared libraries if the GNU linker is available.
The following processor families are supported:
- Intel IA-32. (tested on Pentium, Pentium II, and Pentium III)
- SPARC. (tested on UltraSPARC-I)
- PowerPC. (tested on PowerPC 750 aka G3)
- Alpha. (tested on 21264)
- MIPS. (tested on R10000)
- Intel IA-64.
- ARM. (test on Cortex-A9, i.e. ODROID-U2)
Porting to other architectures requires a few lines of assembly code to implement memory barriers and mutual-exclusion locks.
If you choose to build Cilk straight out of the subversion repository, you will find that certain files are not present. These files include
aclocal.m4
configure.in
configure
... and many Makefile.in files in various directories. To build those
files, you will need aclocal, automake, and autoconf. I made
this work on a Debian "wheezy". I made it work with automake-1.11.6
and autoconf-2.69.
You do this:
aclocal
automake
autoconf
./configure CFLAGS="-D_XOPEN_SOURCE=600 -D_POSIX_C_SOURCE=200809L"
make
If you are compiling on a modern Linux, the above CFLAGS is required.
Copyright (c) 2000 Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Copyright (c) 2000 Matteo Frigo
Portions of cilk2c Copyright (c) 1989, 1990 James A. Roskind
Cilk is distributed under the terms of the GNU General Public License. See file COPYING for details.
For new releases, documentation, and up-to-date information, please refer to: http://supertech.lcs.mit.edu/cilk
Cilk is currently maintained by Matteo Frigo athena@fftw.org. Please send email to cilk-support@lists.sourceforge.net for suggestions, bug reports, and questions about Cilk.