In recent years we have witnessed a tremendous surge in the availability of very fast and inexpensive hardware. However, our ability to design fast and cheap hardware far outstrips our ability to utilize them effectively in solving large problems fast. Hence there is a continuing interest in the study and development of parallel algorithms. In this paper we present a survey of deterministic parallel algorithms for a class of computational problems. Both graph-theoretic and non graph-theoretic problems are considered and the parallel algorithms presented are motivated by identifying some common paradigms.