Welcome to the proceedings of the 2003 International Symposium on Parallel and Distributed Processing and Applications (ISPA 2003) which was held in Aizu-Wakamatsu City, Japan, July 2 4, 2003. Parallel and distributed processing has become a key technology which will play an important part in determining, or at least shaping, future research and development activities in many academic and industrial branches. This inter- tionalsymposiumISPA2003broughttogethercomputerscientistsandengineers, applied mathematicians and researchers to present, discuss and exchange ideas, results, work in progress...