Recently, several machines have been built using field programmable gate array (FPGA) technology. These reconfigurable architectures have demonstrated very high performance for a variety of problems. The configuration of these machines typically rely on some form of hardware specification. The authors demonstrate that a more traditional software approach may be used. A vector based data-parallel model and its mapping to a reconfigurable architecture are introduced. Included in the model are parallel prefix or scan operators. The language supporting this model is a subset of the C programming language. >