The Virtual Interface Architecture (VIA) is an industry standard user-level communication architecture for system area networks. The VIA provides a protected, directly-accessible interface to a network hardware, removing the operating system from the critical communication path. In this paper, we design and implement a user-level Sockets layer over VIA, named SOVIA (Sockets Over VIA). Our objective is to use the SOVIA layer to accelerate the existing Sockets-based applications with a reasonable effort and to provide a portable and high performance communication library based on VIA to the application developers.SOVIA realizes comparable performance to native VIA, showing the minimum latency of 10.5usec and the peak bandwidth of 814Mbps on Giganet's cLAN. We have verified the functional compatibility with the existing Sockets API by porting FTP (File Transfer Protocol) and RPC (Remote Procedure Call) applications over the SOVIA layer. Compared to the Giganet's LANE driver which emulates TCP/IP inside the kernel, SOVIA easily doubles the file transfer bandwidth in FTP and reduces the latency of calling an empty remote procedure by 77% in RPC applications.