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This paper describes WSDLite, a thin software layer that maps a useful subset of the WinSock2 API onto a system area network. The development of WSDLite was motivated by our experience with an early version of Windows Sockets Direct Path (WSDP). WSDP was developed by Microsoft to allow unmodified network applications to exploit the performance and reliability advantages of System Area Networks (SANs). This is accomplished through the use of a software "switch" that, when appropriate, redirects message traffic through the SAN provider protocol stack instead of the standard TCP/IP protocol stack. In addition to the performance advantages, the WSDP architecture offers several other benefits, including automatic support for legacy code, a single well-known API for supporting many different underlying SAN network protocols, and substantially simpler buffer management than that required by the native SAN API. The beta version of WSDP that we examined did not perform as well as expected, achieving only 26% of the native SAN throughput on the system studied. In an effort to determine whether or not this performance difference was intrinsic, we developed WSDLite, a simple alternative to WSDP. WSDLite is a user-level runtime library that implements a small but commonly used subset of the WinSock2 API. For those applications that do not require full WinSock2 functionality, WSDLite provides both the transparency of WSDP and much of the performance benefit of the underlying SAN architecture. In low-level network tests, WSDLite achieves an average of 70% of the native SAN performance. In this paper we describe the design of WSDLite, and present results comparing the performance of both parallel applications and low-level benchmarks using WSDLite, WSDP, TCP, and a native SAN programming library API as the network programming layer.