The system uses implicit parallelism so there is no need for user annotations in the source code. Very promising results have been obtained an the system will be further developed. The system is today not source compatible with the AGENTS system but the differences are mostly related to the module system and names of builtin definitions. The system has no programming environment nor a debugger, it is intended to be a platform for experiments with parallelism not to be a full programming system.
The Penny system has been developed in the ACCLAIM (EP 7195) project (deliverable) and will be publicly available for research purposes. The source is available if you want to take a closer look at the system. The source is not very friendly and there is not much of documentation but it's ready to make.
A precompiled version with some demos, ready to run under SunOS 5.5, is also available. It should have you up and running in a minute.
Look here for related pointers.
Johan Montelius (jm@sics.se)