Full disclosure: I work for Google on Chrome. A Chrome build is truly a computational load to be reckoned with. Without the distributed build, a from-scratch build of Chrome will take at least 30 minutes on a Macbook Pro--maybe an hour(!). TBH I don't remember toughing out a full build without resorting to goma. Even on a hefty workstation, a full build is a go-for-lunch kind of interruption. It will absolutely own a…
As the largest issue is the throwing away of duplicate work, I'd see it as a kind of reverse binary tree: machines working on files that depend on others talk together, then when finished send the condensed work up the chain (and signal their availability for the next workload chunk or phase) until everything collapses down back to the original machine.