General Atomics had to meet strict requirements for data bandwidth and availability. They could have designed and implemented a custom solution for data integration on their own, but that would have significantly delayed the project. Plus the lifecycle cost of developing and maintaining a custom software solution for a specific project can be enormous.

In research programs, the compute intensity of any specific module cannot be determined ahead of time and is subject to continuous change; the ability of one compute engine to manage its load cannot be determined until runtime. The infrastructure needs to provide clear feedback when communication deadlines are not being met byconnected modules. This requires the ability to rapidly and easily reallocate modules to networked nodes. In other words, modules should be able to be reorganized around the distributed architecture without the time and effort of reconfiguring the underlying network integration. This way, researchers can stay focused on application level issues rather than dealing with system architecture problems created by changes in systems integration.