This paper  presents the complex  environment that  was built to  ease the
prototyping of  real-time applications on the  PAPRICA-3 massively parallel
system. Applications are  developed in C++ using high-level  data types and
the  corresponding  Assembly  code  is  automatically  created  by  a  code
generator. A stochastic code optimizer takes the assembly code and improves
it  according  to  a  genetic  approach;  due  to  the  high  computational
power  required  by  this  approach,  the  stochastic  code  optimizer  was
implemented with MPI and runs in parallel on a cluster of workstations. The
availability of this complex environment allowed to test the performance of
the system and to tune it  according to some target applications before the
actual  development  of  the  hardware. For  this  purpose  a  system-level
simulator was also  built to determine the number of  clock cycles required
to run a specific segment of code.

 The whole environment has been used to validate possible solutions for the
hardware  system and  to develop,  test, and  tune several  real-time image
processing applications.

 The hardware  system is now  completely defined  and will be  available in
early 1998.