As computer systems evolve, the volume of data to be processed increases significantly, either as a consequence of the expanding amount of available information, or due to the possibility of performing highly complex operations that were not feasible in the past. Nevertheless, tasks that depend on the manipulation of large amounts of information are still performed at large computational cost, i.e., either the processing time will be large, or they will require intensive use of computer resources. In this scenario, the efficient use of available computational resources is paramount, and...