Well, the example I was thinking of (from after I left HPC) was a search engine, in which most of the computation took place in a NoSQL database. And it did gre

Well, the example I was thinking of (from after I left HPC) was a search engine, in which most of the computation took place in a NoSQL database. And it did great with event-driven programming and heavy-weight processes. You can call it embarrassingly-parallel if you like, from an HPC point of view it is. And that's a fine thing. Glad to see HPC so represented here on HN, but an HPC counter-example does not diminish an example. To put this another way: I wasn't saying that YOUR problem could be solved without threads, I said MY problem could be solved without threads.