The proceedings of the 5th Australasian Conference on Parallel and Real-Time Systems (PART '98) collects some of the exciting and innovative approaches to the problems of high performance computing. At a time when the field is going through a shake-out of commercial solutions, the research presented here gives an insight into new hardware, software and algorithms for achieving high-performance on parallel and reconfigurable computing systems. PART '98 covers networking and processing hardware innovations; network traffic simulation, modeling and routing algorithms; operating systems software and control methods; and parallel algorithms and applications. Special emphasis is on algorithms for managing data and memory and reconfigurable systems. Articles describe activities at both overview level as well as highly technical mathematical analyses of some algorithmic approaches.