IBM IBM IBM This document describes IBM's Shared Memory Communications over RDMA (SMC-R) protocol. This protocol provides Remote Direct Memory Access (RDMA) communications to TCP endpoints in a manner that is transparent to socket applications. It further provides for dynamic discovery of partner RDMA capabilities and dynamic setup of RDMA connections, as well as transparent high availability and load balancing when redundant RDMA network paths are available. It maintains many of the traditional TCP/IP qualities of service such as filtering that enterprise users demand, as well as TCP socket semantics such as urgent data.