This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the First International Conference on Scientific Computing in Object-Oriented Parallel Environments, ISCOPE '97, held in Marina del Rey, California, in December 1997. The volume presents 36 revised papers carefully selected for inclusion in the book. The papers address run-time performance optimization at several levels, new language programming paradigms, applications of Java-based technology, direct applications in various areas, object-oriented libraries, and new ideas and approaches to parallel scientific computing. All in all, this is an up-to-date presentation of the state-of-the-art in the application of object-oriented methods in scientific and engineering applications.