This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the First International Workshop on Communication and Architectural Support for Network-Based Parallel Computing, CANPC'97, held in San Antonio, Texas, USA, in February 1997. The 19 revised full papers presented were carefully selected from a total of 36 submissions. Among the topics addressed are processor/network interfaces, communication protocols, high-performance network technology, operating systems and architectural issues, and load balancing techniques. All in all, the papers competently describe the state-of-the-art for network-based computing systems.