High performance application development remains challenging, particularly for scientists making the transition to a grid environment. In general areas of computing, virtual environments such as Java and .Net have proved successful in fostering application development. Unfortunately, these existing virtual environments do not provide the necessary high performance computing abstractions required by e-scientists. In response, we propose and demonstrate a new approach to the development of a high performance virtual infrastructure: Motor is a virtual machine developed by integrating a high performance message passing library directly within a virtual infrastructure. Motor provides high performance application developers with a common runtime, garbage collection and system libraries, including high performance message passing, whilst retaining strong message passing performance