Hi, Dante-
Glad Hendrik and I are seeing eye-to-eye!
The parallelization can work on individual machines (e.g., on my desktop I used different numbers of CPUs for testing FreeSurfer runtimes, setting the OMP_NUM_THREADS shell variable to specify the number). How many CPUs does Jacco's raid have, or more importantly how many did you use? (That is, what is the output of "afni_check_omp" there?)
For queue times, yes, that might not be so surprising with 72 CPUs requested, depending on the partition. Which Biowulf partition were you using, by the way? (That is, what is your sbatch or swarm command? I typically specify "--partition=norm,quick" for jobs I am reasonably certain will finish under 4 hours, which includes most cases of NL warping and afni_proc.py runs, unless you have bazillions of EPI time points like *some* people in your lab do... they might need more walltime.)
--pt