This book constitutes a carefully arranged selection of revised full papers chosen from the presentations given at the Second International Conference on Vector and Parallel Processing - Systems and Applications, VECPAR'96, held in Porto, Portugal, in September 1996.Besides 10 invited papers by internationally leading experts, 17 papers were accepted from the submitted conference papers for inclusion in this documentation following a second round of refereeing. A broad spectrum of topics and applications for which parallelism contributes to progress is covered, among them parallel linear algebra, computational fluid dynamics, data parallelism, implementational issues, optimization, finite element computations, simulation, and visualisation.