Volcanic ash transport and dispersal models typically describe particle motion via a turbulent velocity field. Particles are advected inside this field from the moment they leave the vent of the volcano until they deposit on the ground. Several techniques exist to simulate particles in an advection field such as finite difference Eulerian, Lagrangian-puff or pure Lagrangian techniques. In this paper, we present a new flexible simulation tool called TETRAS (TEphra TRAnsport Simulator) based on a hybrid Eulerian–Lagrangian model. This scheme offers the advantages of being numerically stable with no numerical diffusion and easily parallelizable. It also allows us to output particle atmospheric concentration or ground mass load at any given time. The model is validated using the advection–diffusion analytical equation. We also obtained a good agreement with field observations of the tephra deposit associated with the 2450 BP Pululagua (Ecuador) and the 1996 Ruapehu (New Zealand) eruptions. As this kind of model can lead to computationally intensive simulations, a parallelization on a distributed memory architecture was developed. A related performance model, taking into account load imbalance, is proposed and its accuracy tested.