Book excerpt: This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 14th International Conference on Parallel Computing, Euro-Par 2008, held in Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, Spain, in August 2008. The 86 revised papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 264 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on support tools and environments; performance prediction and evaluation; scheduling and load balancing; high performance architectures and compilers; parallel and distributed databases; grid and cluster computing; peer-to-peer computing; distributed systems and algorithms; parallel and distributed programming; parallel numerical algorithms; distributed and high-performance multimedia; theory and algorithms for parallel computation; and high performance networks.