Cilk Arts is building Cilk++, a software platform inspired by the award-winning Cilk multithreading language. Cilk is a language developed for parallel computing by a research team at MIT led by Cilk Arts founder and CTO Professor Charles E. Leiserson.
For the past 15 years, Charles has led a team at MIT focused on simplifying the programming of parallel computers. The result is Cilk, a multi-threaded programming platform that has
won many awards for performance and programmer productivity. In the past, the market for Cilk was restricted to high-performance computing. The emergence of multicore processors in mainstream computing means that hundreds of millions of new parallel computers are now being shipped every year. Cilk Arts was formed to capitalize on that opportunity.
In 2006, recognizing the impending avalanche of multicore processors coming to market, Professor Leiserson launched Cilk Arts to create and bring to market a modern version of Cilk that supports the commercial needs of an upcoming generation of programmers. Our founding management team joined Cilk Arts full-time in March of 2007, and we closed our Series A financing in October 2007.
To learn more about the history of Cilk at MIT, including research papers and supporting documentation, please visit http://supertech.csail.mit.edu/cilk/.
In the following short clip, Charles discusses the MIT Cilk Project, starting from projects at Thinking Machines, to the various MIT research projects, to today - creating a venture-backed MIT spin-off.