Exploiting multicore systems with Cilk

Abstract

The increasing prevalence of multicore processors has led to a renewed interest in parallel programming. Cilk is a language extension to C and C++ designed to simplify programming shared-memory multiprocessor systems. The workstealing scheduler in Cilk is provably efficient and maintains well-defined space bounds. [1, 2] A deterministic program (that is, a race-free Cilk program that uses no lock constructs) maintains serial semantics, and such a Cilk program running on P processors will use no more than P times the stack space required by the corresponding serial program.