I've been covering various scientific programs the past few months, but sometimes it's hard to find a package that does what you need. In those cases, you need to go ahead and write your own code.

Here is some news for Java programmers that like to go fast: FastMPJ is hosting Summer of Code 2012 contest on parallel programming with message-passing in Java, and participation is open to everyone.

In the task-parallel model represented by OpenMP, the user specifies the distribution of iterations among processors and then the data travels to the computations. In data-parallel programming, the ...