Napier University in Edinburgh are very pleased to be hosting this year's Communicating Process Architectures 2006 conference. It is perhaps appropriate that a meeting concerning simple ways of designing, implementing and reasoning about concurrent systems should be held in an institution named after the inventor of a simple, and highly concurrent, adding machine. The house in which John Napier lived forms part of the campus where the meeting is being held.

This is the 29th meeting in this conference series. The first was a single day workshop, organised by Inmos, and took place in Bristol in 1985. With the success of the Transputer, we grew into an international conference, with proceedings formally published by IOS Press since March 1988. The fact that we are still here – and thriving – shows that the founding ideas have continuing relevance. Indeed, we believe they are still ahead of the game.

The papers this year are as varied and wide ranging as ever and we thank all the authors for their efforts in submitting papers and returning the camera ready copies to a very tight time schedule. Subjects include various aspects of communicating process theory and their application to designing and building systems. One of the hottest current topics – safe and effective programming models for multicore processors (e.g. IBM's Cell) – has a natural home in this community and is addressed. Other papers include a case study on large scale formal development and verification, CSP mechanisms for Microsoft's .NET framework, parallel systems on embedded and mobile devices, modern link technology (“SpaceWire”), various applications of occam-π, JCSP and JCSP.net (video processing, robotics, massive multiplayer gaming, material and biological modeling, etc.), visual design languages and tools for CSP and real-time systems, new process oriented programming and design environments, new developments of the Transterpreter, efficient cluster computing and the debugging of message-passing systems. And, still, there is The Fringe programme!

We anticipate that you will have a very fruitful get-together and hope that it will provide you with as much inspiration and motivation as we have always experienced. We trust you will survive the many late nights this conference seems to provoke.

Finally, we thank the Programme Committee for all their diligent and hard work in reviewing the papers and Fiona Dick and Jennifer Willies (Napier University) in making the arrangements for this meeting.

Jon Kerridge (Napier University), Frederick Barnes (University of Kent), Peter Welch (University of Kent)