The Distributed Virtual Communication Machine (DVCM) is a software communication architecture for clusters of workstations equipped with programmable network interfaces (NIs) for high-speed networks. DVCM is an extensible architecture, which promotes the transfer of application modules to the NI. By executing ‘closer’ to the network, on the NI CoProcessor, these modules can communicate with significantly higher message rates and lower latencies than achievable at the CPU-level. This paper describes how DVCM modules can be used to enhance the performance of the Cluster Recoverable Memory system (CRMem), a transaction-processing kernel for memory-resident databases. By using the NI CoProcessor for CRMem’s remote operations, our implementation achieves more than 3,000 trans=sec on a simplified TpcB benchmark.