Recently in school, I've been taught C++/OpenMPI in a parallel computing class. I don't really like to program in C++ as its low level and harder to program, easier to make mistakes etc.
So I've been thinking, is JavaScript/NodeJS (something I've started to like) actually truly parallel? Or is it simply using non-blocking operations to simulate parallel execution (which I think it is)? There are libraries like async which gives similar functions to what I've used in OpenMPI: gather, scatter even "parallel". But I've got a feeling its just simulating parallelism using non-blocking IO?
Perhaps only node-webcl is truly parallel?
UPDATE: Seems possible via web workers (~31 min): watching http://www.infoq.com/presentations/Parallel-Programming-with-Nodejs
With Node.js, your JavaScript runs in a single thread. IO is non blocking.