This special issue is one devoted to selected papers from the ACM 2000 Java Grande Conference. It has held in San Francisco on June 3-4, 2000. All the papers have been revised and re-refereed to ensure appropriate journal quality. This was the fifth of a series of meetings, exploring the use of the Java programming language for scientific and engineering computing and high-performance network computing - a range of applications that has been denoted with the epithet "Grande". The previous Java Grande workshops were held very successfully in Syracuse in 1996, Las Vegas in 1997, Palo Alto in 1998 and San Francisco in 1999. The proceedings were also published in special issues of Concurrency: Practice and Experience. (Volume 9, Issues 6 and 11; Volume 10, Issues 11-13, Volume 12 6-8).

The Java Grande conference focuses on the use of Java in the broad area of high-performance computing; including engineering and scientific applications, simulations, data-intensive applications, and other emerging application areas that exploit parallel and distributed computing or combine communication and computing. We believe that Java will play an increasingly important role in these areas. The goal is to provide feedback to users and language developers on what is required to successfully deploy Java in a broad range of scientific and high-performance network computing systems.

Topics covered by Java Grande include:

• Java use for scientific and engineering applications
• Java frameworks and libraries for high-performance computing
• Implementation techniques for Java on high-performance systems
• Java numerics and Java extensions for high-performance computing
• Java compilation and optimization for high-performance computing
• Java development tools and environments for high-performance computing
• Java performance and benchmarking

The 1998 workshop initiated the Java Grande Forum process, which has organized activities aimed at making Java a superior programming environment for "Grande applications". http://www.javagrande.org. This site includes several links to reports and meetings. There are some nifty multimedia interviews from the 2000 Grande conference of Java Grande Heroes by John Gage, Sun Microsystems' Chief Researcher.

I would like to thank the many parties, which helped make this conference a success. First, thanks to ACM SIGPLAN for sponsoring this conference. Dennis Gannon was the general chair and Piyush Mehrotra the program chair. Their tireless work was essential as what that of the program committee and other conference organizers.

Geoffrey Fox

School of Computational Science and Information Technology

Florida State University