Started by small group of well known scientists with the aim of sharing knowledge, experiences, and results on all aspects of cluster computing, the initiative of a workshop on cluster computing received more attention after IFIP WG 10.3 and IEEE Romania Section accepted our request for sponsorship. Moreover, the application for a NATO ARW grant was successful, leading to a greater interest in the workshop. In this respect, we have to say that we chose Romania in order to attract scientists from Central and Eastern European countries and improve the cooperation in the region, in the field of cluster computing. We had an extremely short time to organize the event, but many people joined us and enthusiastically contributed to the process. The success of the workshop is wholly due to the hard work of the organizing committee, members of the program committee, key speakers, speakers from industry, and authors of accepted papers. The workshop consisted of invited and regular paper presentations, followed by discussions, on many important current and emerging topics ranging from sheduling and load balancing to grids. The key speakers devoted their time and efforts to presenting the most interesting results of their research groups, and we all thank them for this . All papers were peer reviewed by two or three reviewers.

"This book provides solutions to these challenges, practices and understanding of contemporary theories and empirical analysis for systems engineering in a way that achieves service excellence"--Provided by publisher.

This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed post-proceedings of the 6th International Conference on Parallel Processing and Applied Mathematics, PPAM 2005. The book presents 135 papers organized in topical sections on parallel and distributed architectures, parallel and distributed non-numerical algorithms, performance analysis, prediction and optimization, grid programming, tools and environments for clusters and grids, applications of parallel/distributed/grid computing, evolutionary computing with applications, parallel data mining, parallel numerics, and mathematical and computing methods.

The area of similarity searching is a very hot topic for both research and c- mercial applications. Current data processing applications use data with c- siderably less structure and much less precise queries than traditional database systems. Examples are multimedia data like images or videos that offer query by example search, product catalogs that provide users with preference based search, scientific data records from observations or experimental analyses such as biochemical and medical data, or XML documents that come from hetero- neous data sources on the Web or in intranets and thus does not exhibit a global schema. Such data can neither be ordered in a canonical manner nor meani- fully searched by precise database queries that would return exact matches. This novel situation is what has given rise to similarity searching, also - ferred to as content based or similarity retrieval. The most general approach to similarity search, still allowing construction of index structures, is modeled in metric space. In this book. Prof. Zezula and his co authors provide the first monograph on this topic, describing its theoretical background as well as the practical search tools of this innovative technology.