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The 7th International Conference on Principles of Distributed Systems (OPODIS2003)washeldduringDecember10-13,2003atLaMartinique, French WestIndies, andwasco-organizedbytheUniversit edesAntillesetdelaGuyane, La Martinique, French West Indies and by Chalmers University of Techn- ogy, Sweden. It continued a tradition of successful conferences with friendly and pleasant atmospheres. The earlier organizations of OPODIS were held in Luzarches (1997), Amiens (1998), Hanoi (1999), Paris (2000), Mexico (2001) and Reims (2002). OPODIS is an open forum for the exchange of state-of-the-art knowledge on distributed computing and systems among researchers from around the world. Following the tradition of the previous organizations, its program is composed of high-quality contributed and invited papers by experts of international caliber in this scienti'c area. The topics of interest are theory, speci'cations, design and implementation of distributed systems, including distributed and multiproc- sor algorithms; communication and synchronization protocols; coordination and consistency protocols; stabilization, reliability and fault-tolerance of distributed systems; performance analysis of distributed algorithms and systems; speci?- tion and veri'cation of distributed systems; security issues in distributed c- puting and systems; and applications of distributed computing, such as emb- ded distributed systems, real-time distributed systems, distributed collaborative environments, peer-to-peer systems, cluster and grid computing.