Book excerpt: The 5th edition of the VECPAR series of conferences marked a change of the conference title. The full conference title now reads VECPAR 2002 — 5th Int- national Conference on High Performance Computing for Computational S- ence. This re?ects more accurately what has been the main emphasis of the conference since its early days in 1993 – the use of computers for solving pr- lems in science and engineering. The present postconference book includes the best papers and invited talks presented during the three days of the conference, held at the Faculty of Engineering of the University of Porto (Portugal), June 26–28 2002. The book is organized into 8 chapters, which as a whole appeal to a wide research community, from those involved in the engineering applications to those interested in the actual details of the hardware or software implementation, in line with what, in these days, tends to be considered as Computational Science and Engineering (CSE). The book comprises a total of 49 papers, with a prominent position reserved for the four invited talks and the two ?rst prizes of the best student paper competition.