DSS, a large-scale ongoing exercise in developing parallel algorithms for high-level synthesis and implementing them in an integrated distributed system to evaluate their individual and collective effectiveness, is discussed. Embedded in a very-high-speed integrated circuit hardware description language (VHDL) centered design environment, DSS consists of a collection of parallel algorithms executing on a multiple input, multiple data (MIMD) multiprocessor machine. The system uses coarse-grained parallelism to explore and evaluate many alternative VLSI designs efficiently. DSSs internal organization and its scheduling, register optimization, interconnection formation, and controller generation techniques are described. Results illustrating DSS performance with respect to design quality, and the efficiency of the DSS algorithms in a multiprocessor environment are presented.