I use a large Platform computational compute cluster often. We use individual processes (not threads) to crunch big data and in general that approach works well.

Each process has its own memory space and its own little bit of the work load to complete. One process can crash or throw and exception and the others keep on going. Having no shared streams or shared data containers to worry with (mutexes, locks, etc) is just wonderful.

We call it poor man's parallelism and some guys who have done a lot of threading make light of it. It's so simple (compared to threads) that it seems like a naive approach. But it performs so well that it's hard to argue with the results.