The complexity of parallel evaluation of linear recurrence

The concept of computers such as C.mmp and ILLIAC IV is to achieve computational speed-up by performing several operations simultaneously with parallel processors. This type of computer organization is referred to as a parallel computer. In this paper, we prove upper bounds on speed-ups achievable by parallel computers for a particular problem, the solution of first order linear recurrences. We consider this problem because it is important in practice and also because it is simply stated so that we might obtain some insight into the nature of parallel computation by studying it.