It was designed to deliver enormous computational power at lower cost than other existing supercomputer architectures, by using thousands of simple processing elements, rather than one or a few highly complex CPUs.

It was based on Goodyear's earlier STARAN array processor, a 4x256 1-bit processing element (PE) computer.

After the MPP was retired in 1991, it was donated to the Smithsonian Institution, and is now in the collection of the National Air and Space Museum's Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center.

In early tests, it was able to extract and separate different land-use areas on Landsat imagery in 18 seconds, as compared with 7 hours on a DEC VAX-11/780.

[1] Once the system was put into production use, NASA's Office of Space Science and Applications solicited proposals from scientists across the country to test and implement a wide range of computational algorithms on the MPP.

40 projects were accepted, to form the "MPP Working Group"; results of most of them were presented at the First Symposium on the Frontiers of Massively Parallel Computation, in 1986.

The processors worked in a bit-slice manner and could operate on variable lengths of data.