PRISMA, a platform for experiments with parallelism

Using a large multiprocessor, consisting of 100 processing nodes, in the area of data and knowledge processing poses challenging research and engineering questions. The PRISMA project presented here has addressed many of the problems encountered by the design and the construction of such a system. Among the results obtained are an implementation of a parallel object-oriented language, a hardware platform with efficient communication, and a distributed main-memory relational database system. Their combination forms a platform for further experimental research in several areas of distributed processing.\ud The PRISMA project is supported by the Dutch Stimuleringsprojectteam Informaticaonderzoek (SPIN