Parallel programming continues to be a challenging task despite the many advances in parallel architectures and their wide availability in the cloud. The need both to partition the workload among various processing elements and to specify communication between them to share code and data, and to coordinate their tasks, requires from the developer a deep understanding of the problem, the parallel architecture and the programming language used in order to develop efficient parallel applications. This problem can be reduced significantly through the use of visual programming languages to hide most aspects related to the specification of communication and processes management. This paper presents VPPE, a novel Visual Parallel Programming Environment that allows developers to program parallel applications through organising workflows of interconnected icons. VPPE is a cloud environment that supports icons for specifying: I/O operations, workflow organisation, communication, and processing. Processing computing patterns supported so far include Single Program Multiple Data, Multiple Program Multiple Data, Pipeline, and Master–Slave. The paper highlights the design of VPPE based on a context-free graph grammar, its current implementation based on Java-MPI, its use in developing various parallel applications, and its evaluation compared to Java-MPI text-based programming.