Book excerpt: This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 8th International Conference on High Performance Computing, HiPC 2001, held in Hyderabad, India, in December 2001.The 29 revised full papers presented together with 5 keynote papers and 3 invited papers were carefully reviewed and selected from 108 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on algorithms, applications, architecture, systems software, communications networks, and challenges in networking.