This text focuses on advanced techniques used in the design of efficient parallel programmes. It presents a wide variety of different models of parallel and distributed computation and applications of these models to the design of efficient algorithms to solve numerical and non-numerical problems. It contains general and specific texts about advanced algorithms for parallel computation and gathers together the state-of-the-art on parallelism with contributions from researchers actively working with parallel computation. The chapters cover a broad variety of models, ranging from abstract shared-memory models such as PRAM to more realistic models of distributed memory, including CGM, LogP and BSP. To the best of our knowledge, no other book in the literature covers state-of-the-art about parallel models as approached in this special edition.