This paper presents an overview of an ongoing NSF-sponsored project for the study of runtime systems and compilers to support the development of efficient OpenMP parallel programs for distributed memory systems. The first part of the paper discusses a prototype compiler, now under development, that will accept OpenMP and will target TreadMarks, a Software Distributed Shared Memory System (SDSM), and Message-Passing Interface (MPI) library routines. A second part of the paper presents ideas for OpenMP extensions that enable the programmer to override the compiler whenever automatic methods fail to generate high-quality code.