The initial version of Gamma consisted of 17 VAX 11/750 processors, each with two megabytes of memory. An 80 megabit/second token ring [PROT85] was used to connect the processors to each other and to another VAX running Unix. This processor acted as the host machine for Gamma. Attached to eight of the processors were 333 megabyte Fujitsu disk drives that were used for storing the database. The diskless processors were used along with the processors with disks to execute join and aggregate function operators in order to explore whether diskless pro- cessors could be exploited effectively
