Abstract: The design and implementation of a new high performance network interface （HPNI） for cluster are presented in this paper. The HPNI network interface maintains a communication buffer table in hardware, can directly transport message data transfered into/out of the network, and provides sufficient support to implement truly zero\|copy communication protocol. Provided the user\|level network access interface and overlapping communication with computation, high communication performance is achieved with HPNI network interface. The latency of 16\|byte message measured at application level is less than 3μs, and the sustained bandwidth reaches 40MB/s for 2K\|byte\|length messages.