Realistic Computer Models

Many real-world applications involve storing and processing large amounts of data. These data sets need to be either stored over the memory hierarchy of one computer or distributed and processed over many parallel computing devices or both. In fact, in many such applications, choosing a realistic computation model proves to be a critical factor in obtaining practically acceptable solutions. In this chapter, we focus on realistic computation models that capture the running time of algorithms involving large data sets on modern computers better than the traditional RAM (and its parallel counterpart PRAM) model.