as the internet gained in public recognition and popularity, universities were among the first institutions to outgrow the internet's bandwidth limitations because of the data transfer requirements faced by academic researchers who needed to collaborate with their colleagues. some universities wanted to support high-performance applications like data mining, medical imaging and particle physics. this resulted in the creation of the very-high-performance backbone network service, or vbns, developed in 1995 by the national science foundation (nsf) and mci for supercomputers at educational institutions. after the expiration of the nsf agreement, vbns largely transitioned to providing service to the government. as a result, the research and education community founded internet2 to serve its networking needs.