[vonmoltke]

It was the signal processor for an airborne surveillance radar. I can't get into specific sizing, but our processing technique was to divide the field of view into a rectangular grid, with each grid square backed by a processing thread. As the beam positions came in (each beam also has its own processing thread) the data from the beams was mapped to the appropriate thread in the grid. Once the sweep was complete, all the threads in the grid would start running the mode algorithms (moving target indication (MTI) or synthetic aperture radar (SAR) imaging), sharing data with their logical neighbors and building a complete picture of the area.

It was basically grid computing, since we had multiple machines that had to be coordinated at certain points in the algorithm chain.