[cctbxbb] Removal of Boost.Thread support

[Nathaniel Echols]

On Wed, Aug 15, 2012 at 1:17 PM, Jeffrey Van Voorst <vanv0059 at umn.edu> wrote:
> One possibility would be to use vendors' FFT libs.

This doesn't really help us - the FFT isn't enough of a limiting step
in refinement etc., which is why we don't distribute the
OpenMP-parallelized builds.  And honestly, the single biggest thing
that could be done to speed up the FFT is to make it take advantage of
crystallographic symmetry instead of working in P1, but that's a huge
task.

> Another possibility is to use multiple processes/threads and communicate via
> zeromq.  zmq is hyped alot, but ipython uses it for multiprocessing and
> pyzmq is fairly easy to get on *nix platforms. I haven't checked into its
> availability on MS Windows.

It's not clear to me where this would actually make a difference -
most of the code either isn't inherently parallel, or is so easily
split up that we can use the multiprocessing module (or even a queuing
system).  The direct summation is the only embarrassingly parallel
routine that I'm aware of that's actually a huge bottleneck.

-Nat