High Performance Fortran (HPF) is the first widely supported, efficient, and portable parallel programming language for shared and distributed memory systems. HPF is realized through a set of directive-based extensions to Fortran 90. It enables application developers and Fortran end-users to write compact, portable, and efficient software that will compile and execute on workstations, shared memory servers, clusters, traditional supercomputers, or massively parallel processors. This article describes a production-quality HPF compiler for a set of parallel machines. Compilation techniques such as data and computation distribution, communication generation, run-time support, and optimization issues are elaborated as the basis for an HPF compiler implementation on distributed memory machines. The performance of this compiler on benchmark programs demonstrates that high efficiency can be achieved executing HPF code on parallel architectures.