This special issue of Parallel Computing mainly presents papers from lectures given at the IFIP Workshop on Cellular Automata held at the castle of Rauischholzhausen (University of GieBen, Germany) March 25-27, 1996. Subsequent to a seminar at Dagstuhl Castle in March 1995, it was the second event of the IFIP Working Group WG 1.5 on Cellular Automata. The workshop was attended by 37 participants from ten countries and four continents. Although a single workshop can never cover a whole area of research completely, the lectures provided a broad view of the state of the art. Under the aspects of the limited size of a special issue on one hand, and a balanced consideration of the different topics on the other, it was only possible to invite some of the speakers to submit a contribution, while a few of them were asked to write a joint paper.
We would like to thank the steering committee of the workshop, K. Culik, M. Garzon, E. Goles, J. Gruska, G. Mauri, J. Mazoyer, H. Umeo and R. Vollmar, and the international group of referees for their efforts and their valuable comments. We also want to acknowledge the help of Wolfgang Rijnsch as the Managing Editor of Parallel Computing and the staff at Elsevier Science B.V.