Systems and methods for multicast send duplication instead of replication in a high performance computing environment. A method can provide a plurality of switches, a plurality of hosts, the plurality of hosts being interconnected via the plurality of switches, wherein a host of the plurality of hosts comprises a multicast sender node, the sender node comprising a system image generation module and a current message sequence module. The method can organize the plurality of switches into two rails, the two or more rails providing redundant connectivity between the plurality of hosts. The method can send two or more duplicate multicast packets on different rails. Upon a receiving node receiving at least two versions of the same multicast packet, only one will be delivered to the communication stack/clients above the layer that handles the encapsulation header.