Heh. Parallel processing was part of my graduate school research--it was more along the lines of using parallel processing to solve mesh problems and reduce the time to solve some intractable problems rather than 'fundamental research into parallel processing'.

The sad part is that the nifty hypercube we were using for our simulations back then is now considered slower and less powerful than the CPU sitting in the laptop I use on a daily basis. We only had a C compiler if I remember correctly....

I'm kind of sorry I left all that behind.