For context, *Lisp (pronounced "star Lisp") was a parallel programming extension to lisp on the Connection Machine System, which was a series of supercomputers. The front-end machine for talking to the CM was either a Unix box or a Symbolics Lisp machine.
Do you know how similar the Connection Machine was to a modern GPU? The descriptions I've seen sound similar, but I don't really know enough to say how similar.
They aren't targeting similar hardware, so aren't very similar. The constructs introduced by *Lisp are designed mainly for issuing SIMD-style instructions to a grid of 256+ processors (in some versions, 10k+).
The paper on it by Steele and Hillis is well-worth reading, as the language's fundamental mechanism of parallelism bears more than a passing resemblance to the MapReduce of 20 years later.
My impression was that MapReduce isn't so much parallelism itself, but rather a way of organising the execution of a programme to take advantage of parallel processors. (Maybe this is a meaningless distinction; I have never written (intentionally) parallel code, and am not familiar with the terminology.) In that sense, Apple's GCD (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grand_Central_Dispatch) is another well known possibility—one of, presumably, many.
I used Star Lisp to program a Connection Machine 1 (the SIMD one) in the 1980s.
I could run the simulator under Coral Common Lisp on my original Macintosh, so, development was very nice since I didn't have easy access to the DARPA provided CM-1 (I had to fly to another city to access it).
Emulating the CM hardware does not make much sense. CM-1 and CM-2 are not real computers but essentially hardware accelerators as all the brains are inside the front-end system. CM-1 and CM-2 architecture can be described as very wide configurable ALU or as FPGA turned inside-out (the CM-1/2 "processor" is mostly same thing as one macrocell in FPGA, with the important difference that CM processor has different configuration for each clock cycle).
So emulating the hardware itself is not especially interesting as there is no real software for it (because it does not run standalone programs).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Connection_Machine