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