Divide-and-Conquer for Parallel Processing

The well known divide-and-conquer paradigm has proved to be useful for deriving efficient algorithms for many problems. Several researchers have pointed out its usefulness for parallel processing; however, the problem of analyzing such parallel algorithms in a realistic setting has been largely overlooked. In this paper a realistic model for divide-and-conquer based algorithms is postulated; the efficiency of some algorithms is then analyzed, taking into account all relevant parameters of the model (time, data movement and number of processors.)