this book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the fourth international conference on parallel computing technologies, pact-97, held in yaroslavl, russia, in september 1997.the volume presents a total of 54 contributions: 21 full papers, 20 short papers, 10 posters, and three tutorials. all papers were selected for inclusion in the proceedings from numerous submissions on the basis of three independent reviews. the volume covers all current topics in parallel processing; it is divided into sections on theory, software, hardware and architecture, applications, posters, and tutorials.