The general-purpose finite element system PERMAS has been ported to parallel computer architectures within the scope of the ESPRIT project EUROPORT-1. The kernel of this 1 M lines of code has been restructured in such a way that parallelism is automatically identified and exploited at runtime. This paper describes the general structure of the approach and the evaluations and models carried out to analyze the potential performance of different algorithms. The study shows the performance bounds of the applica tion, the efficiency of the scheduling algorithms, and the influence of architectural parameters of the target ma chine. The paper also describes some issues of relevance of the approach for such an industrial code. Among them, issues of compatibility with previous versions, reduction of future development, and maintenance costs are addressed.