In this Special Issue we collected nine contributions on Parallel and Distributed Real-Time Systems. Below, we overview all nine papers included, which deal with problems and challenges in this rapidly growing domain. The particular papers tackle different issues related to developing applications. The topics covered in the first two groups of papers vary from off-the-shelf components using CORBA, to scheduling mechanisms in parallel real-time systems and load balancing in this kind of systems, to real-time communication protocols based on multicasting and providing fault tolerance, as well as standard protocols, such as Resource ReSerVation Protocol (RSVP). Another group of papers deals with verification principles in an environment supporting a radio broadcast paradigm and with two most challenging application domains for real-time distributed systems: on-board embedded systems for satellites and control of large high-energy physics experiments. Finally, we make some predictions on the most important aspects of the research practice in the near future, which we believe will have focused on system architectures and the verification process.