Book excerpt: This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the First International Conference on High-Performance Computing and Communications, HPCC 2005, held in Sorrento, Italy in September 2005. The 76 revised full papers and 44 revised short papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 273 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on network protocols, routing, and algorithms; languages and compilers for HPC; parallel and distributed system architectures; embedded systems; parallel and distributed algorithms, wireless and mobile computing, Web services and Internet computing; peer-to-peer computing, grid and cluster computing, reliability, fault-tolerance, and security; performance evaluation and measurement; tools and environments for software development; distributed systems and applications; high performance scientific and engineering computing; database applications and data mining; HPSRF; pervasive computing and communications; and LMS.