This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 5th International Conference on Parallel and Distributed Computing, Applications and Technologies; PDCAT 2004, held in Singapore in December 2004.The 173 papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 242 submissions. The papers focus on parallel and distributed computing from the perspectives of algorithms, networking and architecture, software systems and technologies, and applications. Besides classical topics from high performance computing, major recent developments are addressed, such as molecular computing, date mining, knowledge discovery, optical networks, secure computing and communications, wireless networks, mobile computing, component-based systems, Internet computing, and Web Technologies.