How to organize them is a hard problem. For general-purpose use, we have only three architectures today - shared memory multiprocessors, GPUs, and clusters. When Hopper gave that talk, people were proposing all sorts of non-shared memory multiprocessor setups. The ILLIAC IV and the BBN Butterfly predate that talk, while the NCube, the Transputer, and the Connection Machine followed it by a year or two. This was a hot topic at the time.

All of those were duds. Other than the PS3 Cell, also a dud, none of those architectures were built in quantity. They're really hard to program. You have to organize your program around the data transfer between neighbor units. It really works only for programs that have a spatial structure, such as finite element analysis, weather prediction, or fluid dynamics calculations for nuclear weapons design. Those were a big part of government computing when Hopper was active. They aren't a big part of computing today.

It's interesting that GPUs became generally useful beyond graphics. But that's another story.