An apparatus includes a central processing unit and a parallel processing unit. The parallel processing unit includes an array of software-configurable general purpose processors, a globally-shared memory, and a shared memory. Each of the software-configurable general purpose processors in the array of software-configurable general purpose processors has access to the globally-shared memory to execute one or more portions of at least one of (i) a decoding program, (ii) an encoding program, and (iii) an encoding and decoding program. The shared memory is accessible by the central processing unit to program the shared memory with a map array describing a position of block data in one or more associated arrays.