The ongoing investigation of high performance parallel computing in HEP

Past and current exploitation of parallel computing in High Energy Physics is summarized and a list of R & D projects in this area is presented. The applicability of new parallel hardware and software to physics problems is investigated, in the light of the requirements for computing power of LHC experiments and the current trends in the computer industry. Four main themes are discussed (possibilities for a finer grain of parallelism; fine-grain communication mechanism; usable parallel programming environment; different programming models and architectures, using standard commercial products). Parallel computing technology is potentially of interest for offline and vital for real time applications in LHC. A substantial investment in applications development and evaluation of state of the art hardware and software products is needed. A solid development environment is required at an early stage, before mainline LHC program development begins.