Book excerpt: This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 15th International Conference on High-Performance Computing, HiPC 2008, held in Bangalore, India, in December 2008. The 46 revised full papers presented together with the abstracts of 5 keynote talks were carefully reviewed and selected from 317 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on applications performance optimizazion, parallel algorithms and applications, scheduling and resource management, sensor networks, energy-aware computing, distributed algorithms, communication networks as well as architecture.