This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed post-proceedings of the 5th International Conference on Parallel Processing and Applied Mathematics, PPAM 2003, held in Czestochowa, Poland, in September 2003. The 149 papers presented were carefully selected and improved during two rounds of reviewing and revision. The papers are organized in topical sections on parallel and distributed architectures, scheduling and load balancing, performance analysis and prediction, parallel and distributed non-numerical algorithms, parallel and distributed programming, tools and environments, applications, evolutionary computing, soft computing data and knowledge management, numerical methods and their applications, multi-dimensional systems, grid computing, heterogeneous platforms, high performance numerical computation, large-scale scientific computation, and bioinformatics applications.