“…Parallelism certainly plays the most important role in designing these machines. For data intensive operations, there exists opportunities for performance improvements that can be achieved (Robinson, 1985;Stormon, 1986;Woo, 1985a) -Stream Unification Machines (Shobatake and Aiso, 1986;Tanabe and Aiso, 1987) Resolution Machines -Associative Processors (Hahne et al, 1985;Schneider and Dilger, 1986) -Prolog Machines (Abe et a., 1987;Dorby et al, 1984Dorby et al, , 1985Fagin and Despain, 1987) • Database Machines Deductive Database Machines (Li, 1984;Sakai et al, 1986;Tanaka, 1986) Database Machines for Unnormalized Relations (Lipovski, 1978;Su et al, 1979) • (Shaw, 1985;Stolfo, 1987;Thinking Machines Technical Report, 1987) Intelligent Memory machines (Wah et al, 1984;Yokota and Itoh, 1986) Term/Clause Indexing Contention Free Shared Buffer by exploiting parallelism since the data rate from slow secondary storage can be increased proportionally to the number of disk systems working in parallel. However, for inferencing, parallel processing does not gain much speed up.…”