Usability of parallel processing computers in numerical weather prediction

Computers based on vector processors have been dominating the super computing scene till the last decade. However, with the advent of restricted instruction set computers based processor, it is now possible to design parallel processing computers with large (>64) or massive (>1024) number of inexpensive processors to achieve a peak speed comparable to or exceeding that of a vector computer. The usability of such a parallel processing system depends critically on the nature of the scientific application, especially on the amount of parallelism available