Beginning with the March 1998 release of the Penn State University/NCAR Mesoscale Model (MM5), and continuing through eight subsequent releases up to the present, the official version has run on distributed ‐memory (DM) parallel computers. Source translation and runtime library support minimize the impact of parallelization on the original model source code, with the result that the majority of code is line‐for‐line identical with the original version. Parallel performance and scaling are equivalent to earlier, hand‐parallelized versions; the modifications have no effect when the code is compiled and run without the DM option. Supported computers include the IBM SP, Cray T3E, Fujitsu VPP, Compaq Alpha clusters, and clusters of PCs (so‐called Beowulf clusters). The approach also is compatible with shared‐memory parallel directives, allowing distributed‐memory/shared‐memory hybrid parallelization on distributed‐memory clusters of symmetric multiprocessors.