Data parallel implementation of the thermo-viscoelastic finite element algorithm with a conjugate gradient (CG) method on the CM-5 is presented. The performance study of thermo-viscoelastic finite element procedures on massively parallel processing machines is conducted. Parametric studies on the CM-5 as well as the CRAY Y-MP and benchmarks for several problem sizes are shown. The performance of the conjugate gradient method on the CRAY Y-MP and CM-5 is evaluated and is compared with ones of the CRAY sparse matrix and the Feable solvers. Using the nine-node isoparametric shell element and 256-processor CM-5, a speed-up factor of about 18 over the CRAY Y-MP was obtained for calculating 160 000 element stiffness matrices at a rate of 3 29 Gflops. As for the CG method, the CM-5 out-performed the CRAY Y-MP by a factor of 7 for solving 320 800 equations.