(Perhaps this doesn't quite fit in bug-bash, but help-bash doesn't seem like the right spot, either.)
In case anyone here is interested in writing massively parallel bash scripts, I hereby present MPI-Bash, a set of loadable builtins for bash that let you use the Message Passing Interface (MPI) to communicate across a cluster network. There's also support for the Libcircle distributed-queueing system for easy task distribution. Here's the MPI-Bash URL: https://github.com/losalamos/MPI-Bash So far, I've used MPI-Bash to wrap the cp, tar, and xz commands into parallel versions that run pretty fast on a parallel filesystem. Enjoy, -- Scott