[en] How much speedup can we expect for large scientific parallel programs running on supercomputers. For insight into this problem we extend the parallel processing environment currently existing on the Cray X-MP (a shared memory multiprocessor with at most four processors) to a simulated N-processor environment, where N greater than or equal to 1. Several large scientific parallel programs from Los Alamos National Laboratory were run in this simulated environment, and speedups were predicted. A speedup of 14.4 on 16 processors was measured for one of the three most used codes at the Laboratory