The problems in solving two real life optimal design problems suggest that explicite global optimization methods rather than some ad hock combination of local optimization techniques should be used. It is argumented that the large computing time needed in applying global optimization techniques and the suitability of some of these algorithms to parallelization makes them ideal candidates for execution on parallel computers. Results obtained with parallel Fortran on a 100 processor parallel computer using the processor farm configuration show that good speedup is achievable.