Comment by convolvatron

the CM architecture or programming model wasn't really a DAG. It was more like tensors of arbitrary rank with power of two sizes. Tensor operations themselves were serialized, but each of them ran in parallel. It was however much nicer than coding vectors today - it included Blelloch scans, generalizied scatter-gather, and systolic-esque nearest neighbor operations (shift this tensor in the positive direction along this axis). I would love to see a language like this that runs on modern GPUs, but its really not sufficiently general to get good performance there I think.