Cellular automata are used for designing high-petformance applications in many areas. This paper describes CARPET, a high-level programming language based on the cellular automata model. CARPET is a programming language designed to support the development of parallel high per$ormance software. It exploits the computing power of a highly parallel computer releasing a user from using explicit parallel constructs. A CARPET implementation has been used for programming cellular algorithms in the CAMEL parallel environment. By CARPET a user might write programs to describe the actions of thousands of simple active agents interacting locally, then the CAMEL environment allows a user to observe the global complex evolution that arises from their parallel execution and their local interactions.