The 8th International Conference on Principles of Distributed Systems (OPODIS 2004) was held during December 15-17, 2004 at Grenoble, France. It continued a tradition of successful conferences with friendly and pleasant - mospheres. The earlier organizationsof OPODIS were held in Luzarches(1997), Amiens (1998), Hanoi (1999), Paris (2000), Mexico (2001), Reims (2002) and La Martinique (2003). OPODIS is an open forum for exchange of state-of-the-art knowledge on distributed computing and systems among researchers from around the world. Followingthetraditionofthepreviousorganizations,the2004programwasc- posed of high-quality contributed and invited papers by experts of international caliberinthisscienti?carea. Thetopics ofinterestwerethetheory,speci?cation, design and implementation of distributed systems, which include: - peer-to-peer systems, cluster and grid-based computing - fault tolerance and self-stabilizing systems -real-timeandembeddedsystems - coordination and consistency protocols - distributed and multiprocessor algorithms - communication and synchronization protocols - self-stabilization, reliability and fault tolerance - performance analysis of distributed algorithms and systems - speci?
cation and veri?cation of distributed systems - security issues in distributed computing and systems - distributed collaborative environments - location- and context-aware systems - overlay network architectures In response to the call for papers for OPODIS 2004, in total 102 papers in the above areas were submitted from 28 countries from over the world. Each paper was reviewed by three reviewers, and judged according to scienti?c and presentationquality,originality andrelevance to the conference topics. Then the ProgramCommitteeselected30papers. Theacceptanceratiowaslessthan30%. Besides the technical contributed papers, the program included two exciting invited talks: Prof. David Lee (Ohio State University, USA) and Dr.