this book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the third international conference of the austrian center for parallel computation, acpc 96, held in klagenfurt, austria, in september 1996.the 15 revised full papers presented together with two keynote contributions were selected from 31 submissions by authors from 13 countries. also included are two industrial papers and six posters. the topical emphasis of the book is on parallel databases and parallel input/output aspects; however also other topics are addressed, like parallel hardware, parallel numerics, parallel languages, and tools and algorithms.