Are VPATH and/or parallel builds supported?
Yes, both VPATH and parallel builds are supported. This allows Open MPI to be built in a different directory than where its source code resides (helpful for multi-architecture builds). Open MPI uses Automake for its build system, so For example: shell$ gtar zxf openmpi-1.2.3.tar.gz shell$ cd openmpi-1.2.3 shell$ mkdir build shell$ cd build shell$ ../configure … shell$ make -j 4 Running configure from a different directory from where it actually resides triggers the VPATH build (i.e., it will configure and built itself from the directory where configure was run, not from the directory where configure resides). Some versions of make support parallel builds. The example above shows GNU make’s “-j” option, which specifies how many compile processes may be executing any any given time. We, the Open MPI Team, have found that doubling or quadrupling the number of processors in a machine can significantly speed up an Open MPI compile (since compiles tend to be much more IO bound than CPU bou
