[NEMO-devel] SCOOP support removed

[Ben Elliston]

Hi all

For those that have used it, SCOOP provides parallel workload support
for NEMO so that candidate evaluations can be spread over a
distributed set of CPU resources. Usually this is multiple cores on
your own machine, but it can be a cluster of machines.

Due to a lack of active development, I have removed support for
SCOOP. Problems have been creeping in and, eventually, if NEMO keeps
relying on SCOOP, maintaining SCOOP will become my problem. :-)

Instead, I have replaced the parallel execution code with a simpler
version based on Python's built-in 'multiprocessing' module. It works
well for local multi-core work, but won't scale beyond that. You can
set 'num-cpus' in nemo.cfg to 0 to use all available cores or specify
an exact number of cores to use.

As time allows, I plan to upgrade to a new library like Ray which will
be a big step forward.

Cheers,
Ben