Book excerpt: A large international conference on High Performance Computing and its - plications was held in Shanghai, China, August 8–10, 2004. It served as a forum to present current work by researchers and software developers from around the world as well as to highlight activities in the high performance computing area. It aimed to bring together research scientists, application - oneers,andsoftwaredeveloperstodiscussproblemsandsolutionsandtoid- tify new issues in this area. The conference focused on the design and analysis of high performance computing algorithms, tools, and platforms and their s- enti?c, engineering, medical, and industrial applications. It drew about 150 participants from Canada, China, Germany, India, Iran, Japan, Mexico, S- gapore, South Korea, the United Kingdom, and the United States of America. More than 170 papers were received on a variety of subjects in modern high performance computing and its applications, such as numerical and software algorithm design and analysis, grid computing advance, adaptive and par- lel algorithm development, distributing debugging tools, computational grid and network environment design, computer simulation and visualization, and computational language study and their applications to science, engineering, and medicine. This book contains ninety papers that are representative in these subjects. It serves as an excellent research reference for graduate s- dents, scientists, and engineers who work with high performance computing for problems arising in science, engineering, and medicine. This conference would not have been possible without the support of a number of organizations and agencies and the assistance of many people.