This short paper describes the programming paradigm and the main constructs of the DCEx programming model designed for the implementation of data-centric large-scale parallel applications. The DCEx programming paradigm exploits private data structures and limits the amount of shared data among parallel threads in HPC applications. The key idea of DCEx is structuring programs into data-parallel blocks mapped on computing elements and managed in parallel by a large number of parallel tasks. Data-parallel blocks are the units of shared- and distributed-memory parallel computations and communications in the memory/storage hierarchy. Tasks execute close to data using near-data synchronization according to the PGAS model. Two use cases implemented using DCEx constructs are also outlined and performance measures on different parallel machine configurations are shown.