The increasing use of System  Area Networks demands efficient communication
through  a  direct   access  to  network  resources   and  avoiding  kernel
intervention in communication path.

A  consortium  composed by  Microsoft,  Compaq  and  Intel authored  a  new
standard,  the  Virtual Interface  Architecture  (VIA)  designed to  reduce
software overhead in data transfers.

This  paper  describes  the  implementation of  a  communication  protocol,
based  on VIA,  supporting all  MPI functions  and its  integration in  the
communication layer  of the  LAM/MPI suite. The  reported results,  even if
referring to a software VIA implementation, show a significant reduction in
latency time of LAM/MPI based on VIA with respect to the same library based
on the TCP/IP protocol.