[cctbxbb] Removal of Boost.Thread support

[Jeffrey Van Voorst]

On 8/13/12 10:50 PM, Luc Bourhis wrote:
> Hi fellow cctbx developers,
>
> I am going to ditch support for Boost.Thread and therefore to remove the SF computation parallelised with Boost.Thread as well. Parallelisation at the C++ level should be done with OpenMP: Boost.Thread was merely an early experimentation that was kept alive for no particularly good reasons. If anybody disagrees with that move, please voice your opinion now.
>
> Best wishes,
>
> Luc J. Bourhis
>
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I have been lurking on this mailing list for a bit.  I am very 
interested in and have some practical experience with OpenMP and Nvidia 
CUDA programming.  I work on such projects both to make use of modern 
hardware on typical single user machines, and because, I find it fun.  I 
have found OpenMP to be rather easy to setup and gain good speedup, but 
it is generally very difficult to get close to the maximum theoretical 
performance (N cores gives a speedup of N) for relatively short 
computations (less than 1 second).

I have several questions (that I know may not have simple answers):
0) Is there a public roadmap or recent plan of how to proceed?
1) Does the cctbx developers community take kindly to others meddling in 
the code?
2) For which types of machines would one be trying to tune cctbx's 
OpenMP code?  In general, the tradeoffs are different for machines with 
a small number of cores versus a massive shared memory platform (1000s 
of cores).
3) What is the primary motivation?  (e.g. have easy to extend code that 
make use of more cores because they are there? or highly efficient 
methods that scale very well -- 12 cores should give as close as 
possible to 12x speedup with respect to 1 core)

--Jeff