Memory demands of large-memory applications continue to remain one step ahead of the improvements in DRAM capacities of commodity systems. Performance of such applications degrades rapidly once the system hits the physical memory limit and starts paging to the local disk. A distributed network-based virtual memory scheme is provided which treats remote memory as another level in the memory hierarchy between very fast local memory and very slow local disks. Performance over gigabit Ethernet shows significant performance gains over local disk. Large memory applications may access potentially unlimited network memory resources without requiring any application or operating system code modifications, relinking or recompilation. A preferred embodiment employs kernel-level driver software.