We review emerging approaches to HPCC for both tightly coupled parallel hardware and computational grids -- geographically distributed metacomputers. We base the discussion on the growing power and capability of commodity computing and communication technologies largely driven by commercial distributed information systems. These systems are built from CORBA, Microsoft's COM, Javabeans, and less sophisticated web server and networked approaches. One can abstract these to a three-tier model with largely independent clients connected to a distributed network of servers. The latter host various services including object and relational databases and of course parallel and sequential computing. This network of servers encompassing disparate object and web standards is termed the "Pragmatic Object Web" and we show how to use these concepts even when there is no one universal standard. We look at the implications for educational curricula in "non computer science technical fields"