Writing a faster Python physics simulator

I have been playing around with writing my own physics engine in Python as an exercise in physics and programming. I started out by following the tutorial located here. That went well, but then I found the article "Advanced character physics" by thomas jakobsen, which covered using Verlet integration for simulations, which I found fascinating.

I have been attempting to write my own basic physics simulator using verlet integration, but it turns out to be slightly more difficult than I first expected. I was out browsing for example programs to read, and stumbled accross this one written in Python and I also found this tutorial which uses Processing.

What impresses me about the Processing version is how fast it runs. The cloth alone has 2400 different points being simulated, and that's not including the bodies.

The python example only uses 256 particles for the cloth, and it runs at about 30 frames per second. I tried increasing the number of particles to 2401 (it has to be square for that program to work), it ran at about 3 fps.

Both of these work by storing instances of a particle object in a list, and then iterating through the list, calling each particles "update position" method. As an example, this is the part of the code from the Processing sketch that calculates each particle's new postion:

for (int i = 0; i < pointmasses.size(); i++) {
    PointMass pointmass = (PointMass) pointmasses.get(i);
    pointmass.updateInteractions();
    pointmass.updatePhysics(fixedDeltaTimeSeconds);
}

EDIT: Here is the code from the python version I linked earlier:

"""
verletCloth01.py
Eric Pavey - 2010-07-03 - www.