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Skeletons are reusable, parameterized program components with well-defined semantics and pre-packaged efficient parallel implementation. This paper develops a new, provably cost-optimal implementation of the DS (double-scan) skeleton for programming divide-and-conquer algorithms. Our implementation is based on a novel data structure called plist (pointed list); implementation's performance is estimated using an analytical model. We demonstrate the use of the DS skeleton for parallelizing a tridiagonal system solver and report experimental results for its MPI implementation on a Cray T3E and a Linux cluster: they confirm the performance improvement achieved by the cost-optimal implementation and demonstrate its good predictability by our performance model. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]