1. A method, in a data processing system, for performing a remote direct memory access operation, the method comprising: responsive to receiving in a network interface controller a hash value of data to be copied from a source address in a source node to a destination address in a destination node in the remote direct memory access operation, performing, by the network interface controller, a lookup operation in a translation protection table in the network interface controller to match the hash value to a hash value for data existing in memory of the destination node; responsive to the network interface controller finding a match in the translation protection table, completing the remote direct memory access operation without transferring the data from the source node to the destination node; and responsive to the network interface controller finding a match at a given memory location that is different from the destination address, performing a local copy operation to copy the data from the given memory location to the destination memory location.