An efficient recursive task allocation scheme, based on the Kernighan-Lin mincut bisection heuristic, is proposed for the effective mapping of tasks of a parallel program onto a hypercube parallel computer. It is evaluated by comparison with an adaptive, scaled simulated annealing method. The recursive allocation scheme is shown to be effective on a number of large test task graphs-its solution quality is nearly as good as that produced by simulated annealing, and its computation time is several orders of magnitude less