This paper proposes a middle-grain approach to construct hybrid MPI-OpenMP solutions for SMP clusters from an existing MPI algorithm. Experiments on different cluster platforms show that our solutions exceed the solutions that are based on the de-facto MPI model in most cases, and occasionally by as much as 40% of performance. We also prove an automatic outperformance of a thread-to-thread communication model over a traditional process-to-process communication model in hybrid solutions. In addition, the paper performs a detailed analysis on the hardware and software factors affecting the performance of MPI in comparison to hybrid models.