The Parameterized Pram (preliminary Version)

Various alternatives to the PRAM model have been proposed in recent literature. This paper deenes the notion of cost consistency, and shows that many previous PRAM-type models lack this important attribute. An alternative model of parallel computation, called the Pa-rameterized PRAM, is then introduced. This model is shown to be fully general, in the sense that many other PRAM models may be de-ned in term of the P-PRAM. The P-PRAM is then shown to be a useful tool in parallel algorithm design, due to its inherent cost consistency , and various P-PRAM algorithms are presented and analyzed.