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The Sockets Direct Protocol is a transport-agnostic protocol to support stream sockets over Remote Direct Memory Access network fabrics. SDP was originally defined by the Software Working Group of the InfiniBand Trade Association. Originally designed for InfiniBand , SDP is currently maintained by the OpenFabrics Alliance.
SDP defines a standard wire protocol over an RDMA fabric to support stream sockets. SDP uses various RDMA network features for high-performance zero-copy data transfers. SDP is a pure wire-protocol level specification and does not go into any socket API or implementation specifics.
The purpose of the Sockets Direct Protocol is to provide an RDMA-accelerated alternative to the TCP protocol on IP. The goal is to do this in a manner which is transparent to the application.
Solaris 10 and Solaris 11 Express include support for SDP. Several other Unix operating system variants plan to include support for Sockets Direct Protocol. Windows offers a subsystem called Winsock Direct, which could be used to support SDP.