Here's the best answer I can give, check this out: http://www.scipy.org/
But as for introducing parallelism to cover the latency, it's an old trick and works well. But do you want to be the one to tell people, "you're going to have to introduce parallelism and fingernail-pulling bugs because I want you to use RPC, not shared libraries". I'm sure not going to do it, I've been handed my head enough times by the programmers :-) One thing I've learned: some people will take a hit of a factor of 1000 in performance to preserve their concept of what is easy to use. Hence things like scipy. It works well for many people. ron
