There’s an article in the CACM trying to restore historical context to research in parallel computation: The Resurgence of Parallelism. (One of) the answer(s), it seems, is functional programming:

Parallelism is not new; the realization that it is essential for continued progress in high-performance computing is. Parallelism is not yet a paradigm, but may become so if enough people adopt it as the standard practice and standard way of thinking about computation.

The new era of research in parallel processing can benefit from the results of the extensive research in the 1960s and 1970s, avoiding rediscovery of ideas already documented in the literature: shared memory multiprocessing, determinacy, functional programming, and virtual memory.

Via LtU.