Thanks for looking into it Sebastiaan. Since the beast built/tested before just fine, it is something in recent upgrades (openmpi etc) which triggered some incompatibility issues I guess. Before jumping into patching it, decided to check on upstream plans regarding the release:
https://bitbucket.org/mpi4py/mpi4py/issues/50/is-new-release-210-coming -- Yaroslav O. Halchenko Center for Open Neuroscience http://centerforopenneuroscience.org Dartmouth College, 419 Moore Hall, Hinman Box 6207, Hanover, NH 03755 Phone: +1 (603) 646-9834 Fax: +1 (603) 646-1419 WWW: http://www.linkedin.com/in/yarik