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