POETS (Partially Ordered Event Triggered Systems) is a significantly different way of approaching large, compute intensive problems. The evolution of traditional computer technology has taken us from simple machines with tiny memory and (by todays standards) glacial clock speeds, to multi-gigabyte architectures running orders of magnitude faster, but with the same fundamental process at the heart: a central core doing one thing at a time. Over the past few years, architectures have appeared containing multiple cores, but exploiting these efficiently in the general case remains a ‘holy grail’ of computer science. POETS takes an alternative approach, made possible only today by the proliferation of cheap, small cores and massive reconfigurable platforms. Rather than program explicitly the behaviour of each core and each communication between them, as is done in conventional supercomputers, here the programmer defines a set of relatively small, simple behaviours for the set of cores, and leaves them to get on with it – with the right behavioural definitions, the system ‘self-organises’ to produce the desired results.