High Performance Computing (HPC) research involves many topics such as computational science applications, programming languages, compilers, run-time libraries, operating systems, and computer architecture. In this talk, I will focus on research problems in programming languages and compilers. Specifically, I will present a parallel programming approach called loop chaining that enables a compiler to effectively balance parallelism and data locality. The programmer inserts loop chain pragmas into C/C++ code to control loop schedules at a high level of abstraction. I will show example usage of the pragmas, review attempts to automate the transformation of a legacy scientific code written with specific language constraints to loop chain codes, and present performance results for a computational fluid dynamics benchmark.