Abstract.Clean is an experimental language for specifying functional computations in terms of graph rewriting. It is based on an extension of Term Rewriting Systems (TRS) in which the terms are replaced by graphs. Such a Graph Rewriting System (GRS) consists of a, possibly cyclic, directed graph, called the data graph and graph rewrite rules which specify how this data graph may be rewr~en. Clean is designed to provide a firm base for functional programming. In particular, Clean is suitable as an intermediate language between functional languages and (parallel) target machine architectures. A sequential implementation of Clean on a conventional machine is described and its performance is compared with other systems. The results show that Clean can be efficiently implemented.