Cilk was originally developed at MIT in 1994 as a parallel-programming extension to the C programming language. In 2006 Cilk was spun off into the start-up Cilk Arts, which produced the open-source {cilkpp} platform as an extension to C++. Intel Corporation acquired Cilk Arts in 2009, add vectorization directives, and rechristened {cilkpp} as the Intel Cilk Plus platform, making it available commercially in their own compiler, as well as in open-source implementations for the GCC and LLVM compilers. Research and development on Cilk technology has continued at MIT since Intel acquired Cilk Arts. The most current versions of the Cilk software technology are available here.
-
First Prize in the 1998 ACM SIGPLAN International Conference on Functional Programming's Programming Contest, where Cilk was cited as "the superior programming tool of choice for discriminating hackers."
-
First Prize in the 2006 HPC Challenge Class 2 (Productivity) competition, where Cilk was cited for "Best Overall Productivity."
-
The 2008 10-year-retrospective award by the ACM SIGPLAN Conference on Programming Language Design and Implementation for Mist Influential 1998 PLDI Paper for The implementation of the Cilk-5 multithreaded language.
-
The 2009 Best Paper award by the ACM Symposium on Parallelism in Algorithms and Architectures for Reducers and other Cilk++ hyperobjects.
-
The 2012 Best Paper award by the ACM Symposium on Parallelism in Algorithms and Architectures for Memory-mapping support for reducer hyperobjects,
-
The ACM 2013 Paris Kanellakis Theory and Practice Award.
-
The 2017 Best Paper award by ACM SIGPLAN on Principles and Practice of Parallel Programming for Tapir: Embedding Fork-Join Parallelism into LLVM’s Intermediate Representation.