RFC 1015 (rfc1015) - Page 3 of 24
Implementation plan for interagency research Internet
Alternative Format: Original Text Document
RFC 1015 IRI Plan July 1987 are connected to a NASA supported network. Now a scientist at the same institution but supported by NSF needs access to an NSF supercomputer. It is much more effective to provide that connectivity through an interconnection of NASA and NSF networks than to establish another connection (to NSFnet) to the same university. The need to establish communication infrastructure to permit scientists to access resources without regard to which network they are connected but without violating access controls on either the networks or the resources. A scientist may be supported by multiple agencies, and therefore have access to resources provided by several agencies. It is not cost-effective to have to provide a separate network connection to the scientist for each of those agency resources. The need for a communications infrastructure to encourage collaborative scientific research. One of the primary functions of a computer network supporting science is the encouraging of collaboration between researchers. Scientific disciplines typically cut across many different agencies. Thus, support of this collaboration should be without regard to agency affiliation or support of the scientists involved. The need for a cooperative research and development program to evolve and enhance the IRI and its components where appropriate. Scientific research is highly demanding of both the computing and networking environment. To assure that these needs continue to be met, it is necessary to continually advance the state of the art in networking, and apply the results to the research networks. No individual agency can afford to support the required research alone, nor is it desirable to have inordinate duplication of research. Summary of previous report These reasons led to the formation of the FCCSET Commitee on Very High Performance Computing and its Network Working Group. This group began in early 1985 to discuss the possibility of interconnecting into a common networking facility the various agency networks supporting scientific research. These discussions led to the report issued earlier this year [1] recommending such an approach. The report used the "Network of Networks" or Internet model of interconnection. Using a standard set of protocols, the various networks can be connected to provide a common set of user services across heterogenous networks and heterogenous host computers [2, 3,4]. This approach is discussed further in the Background section Leiner
