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+---
+title: What does spawning mean?
+author: John F. Carr
+---
+
+# What does spawning mean?
+
+I want to explain how the OpenCilk compiler implements spawn, but
+first I need to explain what spawn means.  The `cilk_spawn` keyword is
+fundamentally different from C's `pthread_create` and Java's
+`Thread.start`.  This distinction goes back to the origins of Cilk in
+the 1990s and my description applies to the whole Cilk family of
+languages.
+
+By making threads explicit in the programming model, the old approach
+to multithreading made programs that depended on threads to work.  A
+program with a producer and consumer thread will hang if one of the
+threads doesn't run.
+
+A correct Cilk program behaves the same whether it runs on one thread
+or many.  You do not have to create threads and it is poor style to
+examine thread state.  By default Cilk uses as many _workers_ (threads
+running user code) as your system has processors.  Spawns tell the
+system that part of the program can be moved to these workers.  You
+can also ask it to run single-threaded.  Then spawns don't do
+anything, but the program is still the same.
+
+## Spawning usually does nothing
+
+In most Cilk programs most spawns have no effect.
+
+The keyword `cilk_spawn` means the statement with the spawn is allowed
+to run in parallel with the statements that follow, up until the next
+`cilk_sync`.  It doesn't have to run in parallel and usually it doesn't.
+
+A program we often use for testing and benchmarking computes a
+fibonacci number with an inefficient exponential time algorithm.  The
+number of spawns is comparable to the number computed.  For testing I
+use an argument in the low 40s that takes about a second to run.  The
+program spawns about 100 million times.
+
+Probably less than 100 of those spawns result in added parallelism.
+The rest, 99.9999% of the total, are ignored.  In a highly parallel
+Cilk program the number of scheduling events is related to the number
+of processors.  A perfect scheduler would have the numbers equal.
+There is no perfect scheduler for general purpose programs.
+
+Because most spawns end up having no effect, we work hard to make them
+cheap.  Moving work to a new processor is allowed to be slower because
+it is rare.  We call this the _work-first principle_.
+
+(This is one reason we use our fibonacci number generator as a test.
+Its performance is determined by how fast `cilk_spawn` runs and we
+want that to be fast.)
+
+## The spawn deque
+
+When a function is spawned, i.e. a function call is prefixed with
+`cilk_spawn`, the spawned function is called the _child_ and function
+with the `cilk_spawn` keyword is called the _parent_.
+
+Each worker has a deque (double-ended queue) of parent functions,
+functions that have spawned.  We call one end the _head_ and the other
+the _tail_.  Spawning pushes the *parent* onto the tail.  Returning
+from a spawn pops the parent off the tail.
+
+Usually that's all that happens.  Functions get pushed, functions get
+popped, and in the end push and pop cancel out.
+
+Sometimes, especially at the start of a parallel region of code, a
+worker has nothing to do.  An idle worker _steals_ a function from a
+busy worker by popping it off the *head* of the other worker's deque.
+This _work stealing_ is how parts of the program move between
+processors.
+
+## Only monsters steal children
+
+The thing that was popped off the head of the other worker's deque
+describes a function that is suspended at a function call.  More
+specifically, it is a data structure with enough information to resume
+the parent function as if the spawned child had returned.  The thief
+does this on a new processor.
+
+The worker from which work was stolen, sometimes called the _victim_,
+is so far oblivious.  It continues doing whatever it was doing in the
+child function.  Cilk is designed so a processor keeps running serial
+code as long as it can.  Work first.
+
+Stealing parents and leaving children alone is what makes Cilk Cilk.
+This scheduling policy avoids deadlocks and unnecessary migration of
+work between processors.
+
+The parent function, running on a new processor, has a flag set
+indicating that it has been stolen.  It might spawn again and be
+stolen again.  In any case it will eventually execute a `cilk_sync`.
+If the function has never been stolen (the usual case) `cilk_sync`
+does nothing.  If the function has been stolen `cilk_sync` calls into
+the Cilk runtime.  The runtime suspends the function until all spawned
+children return.
+
+The spawned child will eventually return.  When it returns the worker
+tries to pop the tail of the deque.  This fails: the deque is empty.
+The parent is running on another processor.  Execution can not
+continue.  The worker is now idle and can start stealing.
+
+(We have an optimization for the common case where the parent reached
+a `cilk_sync` and is waiting for the spawn to complete.)
+
+## Stay tuned
+
+Having described at a high level what `cilk_spawn` does, next time I
+will describe what the compiler does to your code when you spawn.
+