1.   There are practical difficulties with parallel computers.

2.   Until now, each parallel computer has been so different that users had to re-write applications every time they changed machines.

3.   American Express, Wal-mart and other large corporations use parallel computers to mine customer records for market trends, and smaller companies want to follow their lead.

4.   And a new massively parallel computer built with chips made by Intel Corp. has been slow to catch on.

5.   A new generation of massively parallel computers is emerging, however, and they have many processing elements and a single, large memory pool.

6.   But even Cray is now moving with the market toward massively parallel computers.

7.   Earlier generations of parallel computers have posed tremendous programming challenges for software designers accustomed to designing their applications for single processors.

8.   In contrast, massively parallel computers chain together hundreds or thousands of standard microprocessors.

9.   Its Navigation Server database software for high performance massively parallel processing computers will ship in the fourth quarter of this year.

10.   Massachusetts played a key role in developing parallel computers.