Special issue on distributed bioinspired algorithms

Parallel computing and distribution of information have been part of the history of computers from the first days. Yet, with the advent and the explosive growth of the Internet in the last decades, distributed systems have become a required backbone supporting everyday task. Meanwhile, microprocessor manufacturers are timelyproviding to the general publicwhat was a chimera in the past:multiple core processors on a single chip. On the other hand, grid computing is moving from being a promising proposal, to a useful technology allowing institutions to share computing resources (Foster and Kesselman 2004). Even computer users have been invited to collaborate among themselves and also with scientists thanks to peer to peer (P2P) (Minar and Hedlund 2004) and volunteer computing technologies (Anderson 2004). In summary, the advancements of communication technologies as well as decreasing costs of hardware, have allowed distributed algorithms to benefit any area ranging from cognitive science to particle physics. Scientists are increasingly realizing the potential provided by parallel and distributed computing. Time consuming algorithms from the past are being reconsidered for profiting the potential underlying parallel and distributed computing. Bioinspired algorithms have been applied to numerous problems in many different domains (Olariu and Zomaya