Book excerpt: This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed post-conference proceedings of the 8th International Conference on High Performance Computing for Computational Science, VECPAR 2008, held in Toulouse, France, in June 2008. The 51 revised full papers presented together with the abstract of a surveying and look-ahead talk were carefully reviewed and selected from 73 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on parallel and distributed computing, cluster and grid computing, problem solving environment and data centric, numerical methods, linear algebra, computing in geosciences and biosciences, imaging and graphics, computing for aerospace and engineering, and high-performance data management in grid environments.