Models of High-Level Computation

Classical models of computation have been successful in capturing the very essence of individual computing devices. Although they are useful to understand computability power and limitations in the small, such models are not suitable to study large-scale complex computations. Accordingly, plenty of formalisms have been proposed in the last half century as an attempt to raise the level of abstraction, with the aim of describing not only a single computing device but interactions among a collection of them. In this paper, we encompass such formalisms into a common framework which we refer to as Models of High-Level Computation. We particularly discuss the semantics, some of the key properties, paradigms and future directions of such models.