Intel software engineer Balaji Iyer announced a port of Intel Cilk Plus in a branch of GCC 4.7 in August 2011. Since then, Intel has worked with the GCC community to bring Cilk Plus to C and C++ users. We’ve recently seen the first fruit of this effort; the GCC community has accepted Cilk Plus array notation for C into the GCC mainline for the next version of the GCC C compiler. Array notation allows users to express high-level operations on entire arrays or sections of arrays. Operations can be applied to multiple array elements in parallel, helping the compiler vectorize the application. A set of functions is provided to perform parallel shifts, rotates, and reductions. This is the first step in an effort to merge the complete implementation of Cilk Plus into the GCC C and C++ compilers. To learn more, visit the Cilk Plus community website to read a tutorial on array notation.
If you’ve been waiting for open source community support of Cilk Plus, you can download the source from http://gcc.gnu.org/svn/gcc/branches/cilkplus-4_8-branch. Directions on how to build and install Cilk Plus on LInux is available at the Cilk Plus community website.
Intel has also announced an effort to implement Cilk Plus in LLVM/CLang. Stay tuned for more information!
For more information about Intel Cilk Plus, see the website http://cilkplus.org. For questions and discussions about Intel Cilk Plus, see the forum http://software.intel.com/en-us/forums/intel-cilk-plus.