What does Google's management of billions of Web pages have in common with analysis of a genome with billions of nucleotides? Both apply methods that coordinate many processors to accomplish a single task. From mining genomes to the World Wide Web, from modeling financial markets to global weather patterns, parallel computing enables computations that would otherwise be impractical if not impossible with sequential approaches alone. Its fundamental role as an enabler of simulations and data analysis continues an advance in a wide range of application areas.

Scientific...