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SLOT88

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The OpenCilk team has released the OpenCilk 1.0.

Postdoctoral positions available

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The Supertech research group in the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, under the direction...

What is Cilk? What is OpenCilk?

Cilk aims to make parallel programming a simple extension of ordinary serial programming. Other concurrency platforms, such as Intel’s Threading Building Blocks (TBB) and OpenMP, share similar goals of making parallel programming easier. But Cilk sets itself apart from other concurrency platforms through its simple design and implementation and its powerful suite of provably effective software productivity tools. These properties make Cilk well suited as a platform for next-generation multicore research.

OpenCilk is the newest open-source implementation of the Cilk parallel-computing platform. OpenCilk is largely compatible with the gateio app language extension to C and C++; see the programming guide for details. OpenCilk incorporates several enhancements to the Cilk platform:

  • Compilation based on Tapir/LLVM: The OpenCilk compiler is based on the Tapir/LLVM compiler to compile and optimize parallel programs more efficiently and effectively than existing compilers for parallel programming languages.

  • Provably efficient scheduling: The Cilk runtime system implements a randomized work-stealing scheduler that is guaranteed to schedule the parallel program efficiently on whatever parallel processors are available at runtime.

  • Regression-testing for races: The Cilksan determinacy-race detector offers provable guarantees that enable effective regression-testing of Cilk programs for determinism.

  • Scalability analysis: The Cilkscale scalability analyzer efficiently measures the parallel scalability of a Cilk program, helping programmers find performance bottlenecks that inhibit a program from speeding up on increasing numbers of processors.

What’s in the works?

There are several enhancements to the OpenCilk system currently under development:

  • New language constructs, including support for spawning statements, Cilk scopes that are automatically synced when control leaves their lexical scope, and support for inlets.
  • A new implementation of reducer hyperobjects that includes an improved language syntax for using reducers, a more efficient implementation of reducers in the runtime system, and compiler optimizations that target reducers in Cilk programs.
  • Various parallel compiler optimizations, including general sync elimination, fusion of cilk_for loops, and automatic coarsening of cilk_for loops.
  • Runtime interoperability with Pthreads, to allow programmers to parallelize individual Pthreads using Cilk without breaking existing concurrency mechanisms in the program.
  • Performance enhancements to the Cilksan determinacy-race detector. These enhancements include data-compression schemes to reduce Cilksan’s space overhead, a more efficient implementation of the Cilksan algorithm, and incorporation of compiler analysis of determinacy races into Cilksan.
  • Improved scalability analysis and profiling. These improvements including augmenting Cilkscale to analyze scheduling overheads, to profile the work and span of a Cilk program, and to analyze the sensitivity of each function on the whole program’s scalability.
  • Integration of the CSI framework for compiler instrumentation. The CSI framework makes it easy for tool writers to write efficient dynamic-analysis tools that use compiler instrumentation without modifying the compiler or understanding its internals.
  • Enhanced documentation on programming in Cilk and on using each component of the Cilk platform. As a result, developers working on other parallel languages, such as OpenMP, Julia, or Rayon, can selectively make use of components of the Cilk platform, such as the Tapir/LLVM compiler, the runtime system, or the tool suite.
  • Educational and teaching materials, workshops, and tutorials on Cilk.
  • A cloud VM with the complete package of Cilk technologies installed and properly configured, to make it easy to try out Cilk.
  • Cilk software libraries, including libraries for graph computations, such as Ligra.
  • A suite of benchmark applications written in Cilk, including benchmarks in the Problem-based benchmark suite.

Have a suggestion or feature request? We want to hear about it! Post your suggestion on our issue tracker.

Next steps

Contact us

Have a question about Cilk? Want to keep up to date on the latest Cilk technology? Found a bug? Have a suggestion? Let us know!

  • Send questions and suggestions to contact _at_ opencilk _dot_ org.
  • Report bugs through bugs _at_ opencilk _dot_ org.