This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed post-proceedings of the 8th International Workshop on Applied Parallel Computing, PARA 2006, held in Umeå, Sweden, in June 2006.This volume contains 4 keynote lectures and 86 revised papers of 15 invited minisymposia arranged on the following topics: stretching time and length scales in biomolecular modelling, recent advances in dense linear algebra, cfd applications for high performance computing, hpc environments: visualization and parallelization tools, tools, frameworks and applications for high performance computing, grid data management, simulations in geophysics and space physics, tools for parallel performance analysis, grids for scientific computing, simulations of materials, novel data formats and algorithms for dense linear algebra computations, bioinformatics and computational biology, scientific visualization and hpc applications, software tools for parallel cfd applications, and multi-scale physics. The 45 revised full papers papers of the main track are organized in topical sections on partial differential equations, grid computing, parallel scientific computing algorithms, linear algebra, simulation environments, algorithms and applications for blue gene/L, scientific computing applications, scientific computing tools, parallel search algorithms, peer-to-peer computing, mobility and security, algorithms for single-chip multiprocessors.