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A general consensus is developing that highly parallel computers are the only practical near-term route to the teraflops of computing power required by many scientific and engineering problems. While current conventional supercomputers already utilize low parallelism, highly parallel computers are still in the experimental stage, although they are increasingly visible at the front line of grand challenge computations. While it has been clearly demonstrated that such systems can be built, and are reliable, there has been only limited success with developing appropriate user-level software. The authors survey recent and upcoming developments in the area of parallel supercomputing, focusing on the underlying trends that have proved successful. The paper begins with discussions of how parallel computers are classified; recent or current parallel computer projects worldwide; node design, including the individual computational processor, along with its associated communications hardware and local memory; interprocessor communication facilities; and software for currently available parallel computers. The next section examines in more depth the parallel systems that are currently in development: INTEL iPSC, CMU iWarp, NCUBE2, GF-11, Connection Machine CM-1, AMT DAP, MasPar MP-1, Myrias SPS-2, and the SUPRENUM. The final section discusses the likely next-generation computing environment: a heterogeneous ensemble of scalar, vector, parallel, and graphics computers along with disk farms and network interfaces to users.