High Performance Fortran is a language designed to support efficient data parallel programming on a variety of parallel machines. This kind of parallel programming has been proven to be very user-friendly, easy to debug and easy to use. In this programming model, the programmer explicitly specifies the layout of data in a global space, relying on a compiler to generate a parallel program including all the communication. While this frees the programmers from the tedium of thinking about local name spaces and message-passing, no assistance is provided in determining an efficient data layout scheme on the target machine.