1. A method for compressing a sequence of multiple-instruction control words, each control word comprising a plurality of ordered fields and each ordered field containing an instruction for an element of a processor, the method comprising: identifying a set of aligned fields that contain NOP instructions in each control words of the sequence of multiple-instruction control words; modifying the sequence of multiple-instruction control words to remove the set of aligned fields; storing an identifier that identifies the set of aligned fields removed; and storing the modified sequence of multiple-instruction control words.