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This article focuses on September 1984 issue of "ACM Computing Surveys." Two articles in this issue explore efforts to improve system performance through parallelism. The articles examine parallel sorting algorithms. They present historical developments in parallel sorting, emphasizing feasibility of algorithms rather than their theoretical aspects. Most of these algorithms employ main memory, and are, therefore, internal sorting approaches, as contrasted with external sorting, where the size of the file to be sorted makes it impossible to use main memory exclusively. Another article discusses parallel algorithms and data structures for graph processing. Graphs are widely used, both in computer science and in related science and engineering fields. The paper gives attention to the feasibility of implementation of these algorithms on parallel processors. Much of the information in this article is very compactly presented in tabular form, showing the principal results by method, model, and complexity.