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 was: Asia 31% Europe 15% US, Canada and Latin Am 49% Australia and Middle East 5% In addition to a strong technical program, we had two excellent Keynote Presentations. * Professor Charles E. Leiserson from the Massachussetts Institute of Technology presented his Keynote Address entitled Cilk++ He discussed the Cilk++ environment and its internal components as well as applications where it can be take advantage of Multicore architectures. Professor Leiserson started its initial work on Cilk two decades ago and Cilk++ is now owned by Intel Corporation. Professor Charles E. Leiserson is a Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at MIT. He is a member of MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL), a member of the Lab's Theory of Computation Group (TOC), and head of its Supercomputing Technologies Group (SuperTech). He is an ACM Fellow. * Professor Nancy Lynch from the Massachussetts Institute of Technology presented his Keynote Address entitled Abstract Mac Layers She discussed recent work to develop and analyze algorithms for wireless networks. This work is intended to identify and solve important problems arising in wireless networks systems. Professor Nancy Lynch is the NEC Professor of Software Science in the Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at MIT. She heads the Theory of Distributed Systems research group in MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. Professor Lynch has received numerous awards for her research, is a Fellow of the ACM and is a Member of the National Academy of Engineering. Awards Ceremony The Awards Ceremony consisted of two parts. The first part was the Best Paper Awards for PDCS'09 and the second part was inducting an IASTED Fellow. * Best Paper Awards There were about 90 papers submitted and 51 papers were were part of the PDCS final program. The papers were partitioned into 10 different technical sessions. About 20% of the papers were nominated (by the reviewers) for the Best Paper Awards, and about 20% of the papers were awarded the Best Paper Awards. The awards were announced during the Banquet. The four papers that received this award were: * Best Paper Award in the Area of Parallel Computing: Topologically Adaptive Parallel Breadth-First Search on Multicore Processors, by Y. Xia and V.K. Prasanna (University of Southern California, USA) * Best Paper Award in the Area of Distributed Computing: 3f-Eventual Timeliness is Enough for Consensus of Resilience F Byzantine Failures, by X. Liu and J. Pu (Chinese Academy of Sciences and Beihang University, PRC) * Best Paper Award in the Area of Emerging Systems: Design and Implementation of ITcell System: Towards the Next-Generation Data Center for Cloud Computing, by S. Shigeta, A. Savva, Y. Imai, T. Yoshida, K. Fukui, K. Nishikawa, and H. Kishimoto (Fujitsu Laboratories Ltd., Japan) * Best Paper Award in the Area of Network Performance: A Scalable Pipeline Architecture for Line Rate Packet Classification on FPGAs, by J.M. Wagner, W. Jiang, and V.K. Prasanna ( University of Southern California, USA) * Inducting a IASTED Fellow. * Professor Teofilo Gonzalez from the Department of Computer Science at the University of California at Santa Barbara was inducted as a IASTED Fellow for his contributions to Multicasting Dissemination Algorithms for Parallel and Distributed Computing, as well as for his decade long commitment to PDCS and IASTED. We have started the initial preparation for the 22st IASTED International Conference on Parallel and Distributed Computing and Systems (PDCS'10) and we are considering several alternatives to enhance our technical program. 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'09 a very successful conference, and we hope to see you all at the PDCS'10 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'09 Program Committee Chair