Surveys current software tools for developing, implementing, and supporting high-performance parallel and distributed computing environments and applications. Four of the six contributions describe message-passing models for network-centric applications, distributed shared memory tools, three specific distributed-object approaches, and several grid architectures. Ping, concurrency, and numerical computation experiments compare the performance of the Java-RMI, CORBA, and DCOM distributed-object technologies. The last chapter presents a software development process for high-performance parallel and distributed computing environments and a sample parallel model of stock option pricing.