Offloading protocol processing will become an important tool in supporting our efforts to deliver increasing bandwidth to applications. In this paper we describe our experience in offloading protocol processing to a programmable gigabit Ethernet network interface card. For our experiments, we selected a simple RTS/CTS (request to send/clear to send) protocol called RMPP (Reliable Message Passing Protocol). This protocol provides end-to-end flow control and full message retransmit in the case of a lost or corrupt packet. By carefully selecting parts of the protocol for offloading, we were able to improve the bandwidth delivered to MPI applications from approximately 280 Mb/s to approximately 700 Mb/s using standard, 1500 byte, Ethernet frames. Using "jumbo", 9000 byte, frames the bandwidth improves from approximately 425 Mb/s to 840 Mb/s. Moreover, we were able to show a significant increase in the availability of the host processor.