In the deregulated electricity market, each generating company has to maximize its own profit by committing suitable generation schedule termed as profit based unit commitment (PBUC). This article proposes a Parallel Particle Swarm Optimization (PPSO) solution to the PBUC problem. This method has better convergence characteristics in obtaining optimum solution. The proposed approach uses a cluster of computers performing parallel operations in a distributed environment for obtaining the PBUC solution. The time complexity and the solution quality with respect to the number of processors in the cluster are thoroughly tested. The method has been applied to 10 unit system and the results show that the proposed PPSO in a distributed cluster constantly outperforms the other methods which are available in the literature.