BUILD_THREADED or SMP_PRESENT

[jedwards4b]

BUILD_THREADED or SMP_PRESENT

[cacraigucar]

CAM does not appear to currently use either of these. I do second the current thinking of using BUILD_THREADED as the the variable moving forward.

[jedwards4b]

@ekluzek We have another variable for testing with NTHRDS==1, FORCE_BUILD_SMP.

[billsacks]

I like the idea of consolidating these into a single variable. Would it be reasonable to keep BUILD_THREADED instead of SMP_PRESENT? I feel like BUILD_THREADED is a much more intuitive variable name – for me anyway.

[jedwards4b]

I can make it BUILD_THREADED.

[ekluzek]

I certainly endorse reducing this to one. The CS side of me thinks that SMP (Shared Memory Parallelism) is more correct and general. But, I think that @cacraigucar and @billsacks are correct in that BUILD_THREADED is more understandable at first glance. I also think that one of the things you want to be able to do is to have BUILD_THREADED==TRUE even with NTHRDS==1, for certain types of debugging. So as long as you can do that.

Is there any history of why there are two? Is there some small difference between them? Not that you shouldn't consolidate, but always good to check if there was some reason for this, so it doesn't come back...

[billsacks]

Part of why I suggested BUILD_THREADED is that I always thought SMP stood for Symmetric MultiProcessing (e.g., see the top hits when you search for "computer science smp"). I don't actually know what that means, but it seems to have something to do with threading, so I convinced myself that there was some connection between Symmetric MultiProcessing and OpenMP-based threading, and never understood why we use this weird term. Erik's spell-out of Shared Memory Parallelism makes so much more sense... but then I'd still argue that this illustrates the problem with using SMP, in that it doesn't really tell you what it is and is open to misinterpretation.

[billsacks]

And thank you @jedwards4b for taking on this cleanup!