Details of their study appear in the current issue of the International Journal of Microcircuits and Electronic Packaging. This allows the programs to run on much smaller computers, which reduces the computation costs. Because they must be constructed to accommodate the largest consumer, they usually don't fit smaller customers very well. Since commercial programs must handle big problems, they require large amounts of data, storage space and computing time. In addition, modification can be difficult and produce unsatisfactory results.
Programs written in-house are more like tailored clothes.
Because they deal with a specific problem, they can fit the problem precisely and produce a more elegant result. Since they must use only necessary data, they can be smaller and require less storage space and time to execute. Not only did it produce equally good results, it did so in less than 2 minutes on a desktop computer. The researchers estimate that the 2-dimensional problem would take more than a month of run time to solve using the commercial package on the Sparc20 workstation. The trend is toward low cost, small size and high reliability.