The paper presents a parallel organisation for recursive bisection type algorithms. The transformation to parallel form is illustrated with reference to the determination of the eigenvalues of a symmetric matrix. The parallel form requires (a) infrequent synchronisation and (b) relatively few data transfers between the processors executing the algorithm and thus is ideally suited for execution on Multiple Instruction Multiple Data (MIMD) type parallel computers. The performance of the algorithm is classified in a system independent manner so that users can predict its efficiency for most parallel computers. This classification into (i) potential speedup with varying numbers of processors (ii) overheads arising from synchronisation and (iii) overheads arising from data transfer can be made without running the algorithm on a computer. The algorithm was tested on a two processor MIMD system at Loughborough University.