The 2004 International Conference on Parallel and Distributed Computing, - plications and Technologies (PDCAT 2004) was the fifth annual conference, and was held at the Marina Mandarin Hotel, Singapore on December 8–10, 2004. Since the inaugural PDCAT held in Hong Kong in 2000, the conference has - come a major forum for scientists, engineers, and practitioners throughout the world to present the latest research, results, ideas, developments, techniques, and applications in all areas of parallel and distributed computing. The technical program was comprehensive and featured keynote speeches, te- nical paper presentations, and exhibitions showcased by industry vendors. The technical program committee was overwhelmed with submissions of papers for presentation, from countries worldwide. We received 242 papers and after - viewing them, based on stringent selection criteria, we accepted 173 papers. The papers in the proceedings focus on parallel and distributed computing viewed from the three perspectives of networking and architectures, software systems and technologies, and algorithms and applications. We acknowledge the great contribution from all of our local and international committee members and - perreviewers who devoted their time in the review process and provided valuable feedback for the authors. PDCAT 2004 could never have been successful without the support and ass- tance of several institutions and many people. We sincerely appreciate the s- port from the National Grid Office and IEEE, Singapore for technical co-sponsorship. The financial sponsorships from the industrial sponsors, Hewlett- Packard Singapore; IBM Singapore; Sun Microsystems; SANDZ Solutions; S- icon Graphics, and Advanced Digital Information Corporation, are gratefully acknowledged.