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Networkswith Remote DirectMemoryAccess (RDMA) support are becoming increasingly common. RDMA, however, offers a limited programming interface to remote memory that consists of read, write and atomic operations. With RDMA alone, completing the most basic operations on remote data structures often requires multiple round-trips over the network. Data-intensive systems strongly desire higher-level communication abstractions that supportmore complex interaction patterns. A natural candidate to consider is MPI, the de facto standard for developing high-performance applications in the HPC community. This paper critically evaluates the communication primitives of MPI and shows that using MPI in the context of a data processing system comes with its own set of insurmountable challenges. Based on this analysis, we propose a new communication abstraction named RDMO, or Remote DirectMemory Operation, that dispatches a short sequence of reads, writes and atomic operations to remote memory and executes them in a single round-trip.