We s u r v ey general techniques and open problems in numerical linear algebra on parallel architectures. We rst discuss basic principles of parallel processing, describing the costs of basic operations on parallel machines, including general principles for constructing e cient algorithms. We illustrate these principles using current architectures and software systems, and by showing how one would implement matrix multiplication. Then, we present direct and iterative algorithms for solving linear systems of equations, linear least squares problems, the symmetric eigenvalue problem, the nonsymmetric eigenvalue problem, and the singular value decomposition. We consider dense, band and sparse matrices.