Viewtier, the maker of the Parabuild continuous build and integration environment, released Parabuild 3.1, providing the ability to distribute a build task across several build servers.

Because Viewtier integrates with existing build scripts and Ant or Make files, it can be used to build projects regardless of the programming language used. In addition to multiple language support, a key feature of Parabuild is the ability to execute a build on a remote systems:

Build manager and remote builders can run on different platforms. Windows, Cygwin, Linux, Solaris, HP UX and generic Unix, including Mac OS X, are supported. Parabuild maintains the access to build administration, statuses, logs and results from a single build management server even if a build runs remotely.

One reason to execute a build remotely is to speed up the build process, provided the remote machine has more processing resources than what the local build server can offer. With the latest release, Parabuild supports another option for speeding up builds via parallel execution:

Now it is possible to launch and run multiple builds on multiple hosts and platform in parallel. Parabuild ensures that all builds run against the same code base and have the same build number or product version...

Applications of parallel builds are many. The most obvious [ones] include multiplatform building and testing ... and build acceleration that can be easily archived by moving parts of a whole build process to multiple host.

With the major enterprise software management vendors now all supporting remote as well as parallel builds and unit test execution, for what size project would you actually consider to run your builds in parallel?