We recently settled on Ubuntu as a common operating system for the machines on which we run biological models. That meant I have to reinstall Swarm and we encountered the same error Jim cites here.  Our failure is because the configure script doesn’t test for the amd64 platform.  I added the following lines to the configure (after line 19,539):

elif test -d ${jdkdir}/jre/lib/amd64/native_threads; then
threads=native
JAVACMD="\${jdkdir}/jre/bin/java"

That seems to have fixed our problem, perhaps it will help others who encounter the same error.