I've rolled a successful caching mechanism for configure artifacts, in my biggest project. You install it as a git hook: post-checkout. The cache is keyed on a SHA256 sum taken over the configuration inputs. (The ones in the repo, not the environment. The host environment is assumed to be static.) These inputs do not change for many commits at a time when the configure system isn't touched. During a bisect operation, the cache can be expected to quickly warm up, reducing the number of configuration operations needed, even on the host where repository was just cleanly cloned and the cache is empty.

It's not parallel config, but it's pretty cool. In some ways it's better because when there's a hit it's instant.

It's quite synergistic with ccache as well. You navigate to a commit. You are informed that cash config info was retrieved successfully, so you skip configure and run make. All the objects are retrieved from ccache.