Book excerpt: The demand for greater computer power in numerical weather prediction and meteorological research is as strong as ever. The world meteorological community has tried to meet this demand by exploiting parallelism. In this field, the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts has established itself as the central venue for bringing together operational weather forecasters, climate researchers and parallel computer manufacturers to share their experiences through a series of workshops held every other year. This book reports on the latest workshop (2-6 December 1996) and is an excellent overview of the success which parallel systems have gained in meteorology worldwide, and how it was achieved. In addition, future trends in computer hardware and software development and its implications for meteorological computing are outlined.