A need to apply the massively parallel computing paradigm in embedded real-time systems is foreseen. Such applications put new demands on massively parallel systems, different from those of general purpose computing. For example, time determinism is more important than maximal throughput, physical distribution is often required, size, power, and I/O are important, and interactive development tools are needed. The paper describes an architecture for high-performance, embedded, massively parallel processing, featuring a large number of nodes physically distributed over a large area. A typical node has thousands of processing elements (PEs) organized in SIMD mode and is the size of the palm of a hand, Intermodule communication over a scalable optical network is described. A combination of wavelength division multiplexing (WDM) and time division multiplexing (TDM) is used. © 1994 IEEE.