To: lwn@lwn.net
Subject: [ANNOUNCE] Cilk-5.3 released
From: Matteo Frigo <athena@fftw.org>
Date: 05 Jun 2000 19:13:53 +0200

[In case you guys are interested...]

I am pleased to announce the availability of Cilk-5.3.

Cilk is a language for multithreaded parallel programming based on
ANSI C.  Cilk is designed for general-purpose parallel programming,
but it is especially effective for exploiting dynamic, highly
asynchronous parallelism.  This 5.3 release contains the Cilk
compiler, the Cilk runtime system, and example programs.

Cilk has been developed since 1994 at the MIT Laboratory for Computer
Science by Prof. Charles E. Leiserson and his group.  Besides being
used for research and teaching, Cilk was the system used to code the
three world-class chess programs *Tech, *Socrates, and Cilkchess.
Over the years, implementations of Cilk have run on computers ranging
from networks of Linux laptops to an 1824-nodes Intel Paragon.

The current Cilk-5.3 release runs on symmetric multiprocessor (SMP)
machines that support Posix threads, GNU make, and gcc.  Cilk-5.3 was
developed and tested mainly on GNU/Linux, IRIX, Digital Unix, and
Solaris/SPARC, but porting Cilk to other Unix systems where the GNU
compilation tools are available should be quite easy.  You can also
run Cilk-5.3 on uniprocessor machines.  This configuration is useful
for program development and debugging, even though you will not get
any parallel speedup.

This release of Cilk is targeted at the computing community at large,
and not only at parallel-computing specialists.  We tried to make Cilk
easy to install and to use.  If you know the C language, you should be
able to write simple parallel Cilk programs quickly.

To download Cilk-5.3 and for up-to-date information, please
visit the Cilk web page at

	http://supertech.lcs.mit.edu/cilk

Regards,
Matteo Frigo