Intel® Cilk Plus

Intel^® Cilk™ Plus is now available in open-source and for GCC 4.7!
Read more here.

Intel^® Cilk™ Plus is an extension to C and C++ that offers a quick, easy and reliable way to improve the performance of programs on multicore processors. The three Intel Cilk Plus keywords provide a simple yet surprisingly powerful model for parallel programming, while runtime and template libraries offer a well-tuned environment for building parallel applications. Intel Cilk Plus allows you to:

• Write parallel programs using a simple model: With only three keywords to learn, C and C++ developers move quickly into the parallel programming domain.

• Utilize data parallelism by simple array notations that include elemental function capabilities.

• Leverage existing serial tools: The serial semantics of Intel Cilk Plus allows you to debug in a familiar serial debugger.

• Scale for the future: The runtime system operates smoothly on systems with hundreds of cores.

As multicore systems become prevalent on desktops, servers and even laptop systems, new performance leaps will come as the industry adopts parallel programming techniques. However, many parallel environments consist of confusing, complex and error-prone rules and constructs. The Intel Cilk Plus language, built on the Cilk technology developed at M.I.T. over the past two decades, is designed to provide a simple, well-structured model that makes development, verification and analysis easy. Because Intel Cilk Plus is an extension to C and C++, programmers typically do not need to restructure programs significantly in order to add parallelism.

Learn

• Latest documentation for Intel® Cilk Plus

• Latest release notes for Intel® Cilk Plus

• Intel® Cilk™ Plus Evaluation Guide

• Video: Introduction to Intel® Cilk™ Plus

• Intel^® Parallel Composer 2011 Getting Started Guide (includes Intel Cilk Plus tutorial)

• Elemental functions: Writing data parallel code in C/C++ using Intel® Cilk™ Plus whitepaper

• Intel Cilk Plus User Forum

• Intel Cilk Plus Support Page

Obtain

The Intel Cilk Plus extension to C and C++ is now available in the "cilkplus" branch of GCC 4.7. Contributions are welcome! The Intel Cilk Plus runtime source kit is now available as well.

Intel Cilk Plus is available in Intel® Parallel Building Blocks which is supported by:

• Intel® Parallel Studio XE 2011

• Intel® Composer XE 2011

• Intel® Parallel Studio 2011

• Intel® Parallel Composer 2011

Visit our Software Evaluation Center to get a copy of these products.

Intel® Cilk™ Plus SDK - Race detection and scalability analysis tools for Cilk-style parallelized binaries compiled with the Intel® Parallel Composer 2011 and Intel® C++ Composer XE products.

Specification

Intel® Cilk™ Plus specification and runtime ABI, v1.1, available for review and comments