11 Facts About Cilk

The name Cilk is not an acronym, but an allusion to "nice threads" and the C programming language.

Original Cilk language was based on ANSI C, with the addition of Cilk-specific keywords to signal parallelism.

Cilk was implemented as a translator to C, targeting the GNU C Compiler.

On July 31,2009, Cilk Arts announced on its web site that its products and engineering team were now part of Intel Corp.

Intel and Cilk Arts integrated and advanced the technology further resulting in a September 2010 release of Intel Cilk Plus.

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Principle behind the design of the Cilk language is that the programmer should be responsible for exposing the parallelism, identifying elements that can safely be executed in parallel; it should then be left to the run-time environment, particularly the scheduler, to decide during execution how to actually divide the work between processors.

The original Cilk required any function using these to be annotated with the keyword, which is gone as of Cilk Plus.

The original Cilk used a rather different syntax that required programming in an explicit continuation-passing style, and the Fibonacci examples looks as follows:.

Two remaining Cilk keywords are slightly more advanced, and concern the use of inlets.

In Cilk Plus, an elemental function is a regular function which can be invoked either on scalar arguments or on array elements in parallel.

Cilk scheduler uses a policy called "work-stealing" to divide procedure execution efficiently among multiple processors.