On behalf of the program committee co-chairs of IFIP 2011 International Conference on Network and Parallel Computing (NPC 2011), we are very happy to organize a special section of five best paper nominees selected from the conference. The committee reviewed our 54 submissions over a 6-week period from mid-April to the end of May 2011, with an average of 3.7 reviews per paper. The committee then conducted a virtual and email PC meeting over the first two weeks of June to discuss papers and make selections for the conference. The EasyChair reviewing system used for the conference facilitated this virtual meeting and discussion. Comments made by any PC member on the EasyChair site were emailed to all other PC members assigned that paper, to the two of us as PC Chairs, and to any other PC members interested in that paper. In addition, we tried to seed discussions especially among controversial papers by commenting on the key points of reviews and highlighting differences of opinion. To avoid any hint of bias in selecting papers, discussion was double-blind throughout. There was clear consensus on almost all papers, and we had discussions and majority rule of PC members who reviewed a paper in the small set of cases where there was continuing disagreement.