The Intel Paragon is a distributed memory machine based on a grid network. Each processor contains two i860s. One i860 is used to run the user code and one handles the message traffic and talks to the special mesh router. (Unfortunately, our testbed Paragon system is running ``pre-release'' software which only uses one of the i860s.) The basic communication library is the NX system that has been used for many years on the Intel machines. NX only provides a very primitive interrupt driven message handler mechanism; consequently, only the polling strategy can be used. Furthermore, NX is not well optimized for very short messages, such as locating the owner of an element. In addition, implementing a barrier function that must also poll for messages is non-trivial and results in slow operation. Barrier execution takes approximately 3 milliseconds. However, the native NX barrier which does not do polling is not much faster (about 2 milliseconds). Combined with the effect of pre-release software, the performance of the pC++ runtime system on the Intel Paragon is non-optimal.