This paper describes the architecture of a multi-DSP based acoustic front-end (AkuFE) developed within the speaker adaptive continuous speech understanding and dialogue system SPICOS. The AkuFE is designed as a configurable high performance signal processing VMEbus system employing up to five Texas Instruments TMS320C25 signal processors and an ASIC for vector quantization (VQ) developed within the project. The system is realized on three boards and achieves a total computational power of more than 100 MIPs. In this case two VQ processors can work in parallel. A 68020 based workstation serves as host computer. The AkuFE is employed for the real-time acoustic-phonetic decoding task in the SPICOS system. Due to its flexibility, it can be used for a wide range of real-time speech processing tasks.