Welcome to this year’s first issue of IEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems (TPDS). The author is privileged to serve our community proceeding into his third year as the editor-in-chief (EiC) of TPDS and looks forward to continuing his service to our growing community. Thank you to Prof. Manish Parashar from Rutgers University for his service role as the associate editor-in-chief of TPDS, and all of our associate editors. TPDS continues to be one of the healthiest IEEE Transactions. In the past 12 months, we’ve received 902 submissions, and reduced the time from submission to first decision from 75 days (as of January 2014) to 48 days on average now (as of November 2015). Our acceptance rate for the past 12 months is 24.4 % based upon our peer-review process and reflects a rigorous process for evaluating the top-tier research contributions in this area. TPDS is among the first IEEE Transactions to adopt the OnlinePlus publication model, and the abstract booklet and disk is distributed on a quarterly basis to subscribers. The EiC’s goals are to increase the visibility and relevance of TPDS. IEEE is a hallmark of quality for technical publication. The value TPDS brings to the international community is in its collection of the highest quality research that is relevant to academia, industry, and laboratories. The topics covered by the leading research in the community change over time as technology rapidly changes in the parallel and distributed systems area, and the TPDS scope should be updated to reflect these areas of interest and ‘hot topics’ in the subfields of parallel and distributed systems. In 2014, the EiC worked with the community and the Computer Society to update and revise the Transaction’s scope to highlight several new areas in exascale computing and big data. This revised scope brings these Transactions into better alignment with the IEEE Computer Society’s flagship conferences in these areas.