The LogP machine is a model for parallel computation.
It aims at being more practical than the PRAM

Parallel Random Access Machine

In computer science, Parallel Random Access Machine is a shared memory abstract machine. As its name indicates, the PRAM was intended as the parallel computing analogy to the random access machine...

model while still allowing for easy analysis of computation.
The name is not related to the mathematical logarithmic function: Instead, the machine is described by the four parameters , , and .

The LogP machine consists of arbitrarily many processing units with distributed memory.
The processing units are connected through an abstract communication medium which allows point-to-point communication.

The machine is described by the four parameters:

• , the latency of the communication medium.
• , the overhead of sending and receiving a message.
• , the gap required between two send/receive operations.
• , the number of processing units. Each local operation on each machine takes the same time (``unit time). This time is called a processor cycle.

The units of the parameters , and are measured in multiples of processor cycles.