Performance Engineering is concerned with the reliable prediction and estimation of the performance of scientific and engineering applications on a variety of parallel and distributed hardware. This paper reviews the present state of the art in ′Performance Engineering′ for both parallel computing and meta‐computing environments and attempts to look forward to the application of these techniques in the wider context of Problem Solving Environments and the Grid. The paper compares various techniques such as benchmarking, performance measurements, analytical modelling and simulation, and highlights the lessons learned in the related projects. The paper concludes with a discussion of the challenges of extending such methodologies to computational Grid environments.