The increasing intensity and variety of computation in solving modern science, engineering, and social application problems have brought numerous challenges to parallel and distributed computing and enriched its research content in multiple folds from architecture design to computation paradigm and security with the focuses on computation efficiency for problem solving, data protection for large‐scale applications, and energy efficiency for power savings and environment protection. The objective of this Special Section is to show some representative research results on these focuses. This Special Section includes three extended papers primarily selected from the papers presented at the 17th International Conference on Parallel and Distributed Computing, Applications and Technologies (PDCAT 2016).