NASA's Information Systems Office has recently established a NASA Science Internet program to coordinate and consolidate several discipline - oriented networks in order to promote better access to space - acquired data. NSF's Division of Networking and Communications Research and Infrastructure (DNCRI) is responsible for NSFNET for the purpose of improving access to supercomputers and encouraging greater and more effective communication and collaboration within the scientific and engineering research community. Since the network user communities of NASA and NSF largely overlap, it is advantageous for the two networking implementations to be coordinated in order to minimize duplication of facilities, reduce duplicate and wasteful effort, and control overall costs. Accordingly, the NASA Information Systems Offices has agreed to host several planning conference for their network programs which would be highly interdependent on coordination and cooperation of NSFnet implementors. NASA will plan the logistics of these meetings and assist in the preparation of the agenda and advance materials. It is expected that these planning conferences will include other federal agencies in addition to NASA and NSF, specifically, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) and the Department of Energy (DOE).
