This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed post-proceedings of the 5th International Conference on High Performance Computing for Computational Science, VECPAR 2002, held in Porto, Portugal in June 2002. The 45 revised full papers presented together with 4 invited papers were carefully selected during two rounds of reviewing and improvement. The papers are organized in topical sections on fluids and structures, data mining, computing in chemistry and biology, problem solving environments, computational linear and non-linear algebra, cluster computing, imaging, and software tools and environments.