1. A method of distributing parallel algorithms of a parallel application among compute nodes of an operational group in a parallel computer, the method comprising: establishing a hardware profile, the hardware profile describing thermal characteristics of each compute node in the operational group; establishing a hardware independent application profile, the application profile describing thermal characteristics of each parallel algorithm of the parallel application; and mapping, in dependence upon the hardware profile and application profile, each parallel algorithm of the parallel application to a compute node in the operational group.