The PDCS'08 conference was again a complete success.  Our conference
continues to be a truly international conference.  The current
affiliation of the authors when grouped by geographical regions is:

            Asia                     39%
            Europe                   28%
            US, Canada and Latin Am  33%


In addition to a strong technical program, we had an excellent Keynote
Presentations.

* On November 16th, Professor Sartaj Sahni from the University of Florida
presented his Keynote Address entitled 
 
    Algorithms for Wireless Sensor Networks

artaj Sahni is a Distinguished Professor and Chair of the Computer and
Information Science and Engineering Department at the University of Florida.
He discussed opportunities and challenges in Sensor Networks.

* Best Paper Awards
  There were about 55 papers partitioned into 8 different technical
  sessions About 20% of the papers accepted were nominated (by the
  reviewers) for the Best Paper Awards.  The awards were announced
  during the Banquet.  The four papers that received this award were: 

  * The Best Paper Award in the Area of Distributed Information and Systems:
     A DSM Protocol Aware of both Thread Migration and Memory Constraints
     by R. Veldema, B. Larsen and M. Philiossen (Germany)

  * The Best Paper Award in the Area of Resource Allocation, Scheduling
    and Load Balancing:
    On the Timeliness of a Cluster based Large Scale Online Video Surveillance
    by K. Sinha, A.D. Chowdhury, S.K. Ghosh abd S. Banerjee (India)

  * The Best Paper Award in the Area of Software Systems and Tools
    Multi-Connection and Multi-Core Aware All-Gather on Infiniband Clusters
    by Y. Qian, M.J. Rshti and A. Afsahi (Canada).

  * The Best Paper Award in the Area of Routing Algorithms and Protocols
     Adaptation Level and Injection Control in a Quasi-Globally Adaptive Routing
     by T. Yokota, K. Ootsu and T. Baba (Japan)

We have started the initial preparation for the 21st IASTED
International Conference on Parallel and Distributed Computing
and Systems (PDCS'09) and we are considering several alternatives
to enhance our technical program.  The conference will be held
on Nov. 2 - 4, 2009 in Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA.  You will all receive
further announcements in the near future and we hope we can count
again with your support.

Thank you very much for all your support and your efforts to make
PDCS'08 a very successful conference, and we hope to see you all at
the PDCS'09 Conference.  Please keep in mind the possibility of
organizing special sessions, and feel free to contact IASTED
(calgary@IASTED.com) and/or me (teo@cs.ucsb.edu) with any comments
and suggestions about possible improvements to the conference.



Sincerely Yours,

Teofilo F. Gonzalez
PDCS'08 Program Committee Chair