Hi Jerry,

yes you're right, that the performance is not the optimum.
This is also caused by the network bottleneck. Files have
to be moved around.
But first I also used distcc, but it is dangerous when
non-CentOS systems or mixed 64 and 32-bit systems are in
action. In these cases code linkage failes. So I switched
to icecc, which first distributes the right compilers
(which the system doing the make job has currently
installed). There is also someone who compiles with 
Gentoo on the CentOS cluster with a different gcc version
and it works perfectly.

Greetings,
Brian.