The h’2 project aims to develop a distributed memory parallel processor(DMPP) that exploits the benejits of this class of machines, but appears to the user—and can be programmed and debugged—much like a conventional uniprocessor. To this end, we have concentrated our eflorts on the development of an automatically parallelizing compiler and a multi-user, multi-tasking, time-sharing operating system. However, supporting the above features on commercially available DMPPs would have been either impossible or too expensive. For this reason, a workbench machine has been designed and is currently being implemented. In what follows we present the machine architecture, the paralielizing compiler, and the operating system.