Traditionally, providing parallel processing within a multi-core system has been very difficult. Here, however, a system is provided where serial source code is automatically converted into parallel source code, and a processing cluster is reconfigured “on the fly” to accommodate the parallelized code based on an allocation of memory and compute resources. Thus, the processing cluster and its corresponding system programming tool provide a system that can perform parallel processing from a serial program that is transparent to a user. Generally, a control node connected to the address and data leads of a host processor uses messages to control the processing of data in a processing cluster. The cluster includes nodes of parallel processors, shared function memory, a global load/store, and hardware accelerators all connected to the control node by message busses. A crossbar data interconnect routes data to the cluster circuits separate from the message busses.