  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.
