We (our team) saw that it's possible to include standalone app to a plugin. The app is used to modify Petrel's data in the specific way. See for example these plugins:
We want to do the same thing so there are questions:
How the plugin perform editing Petrel's data?
Does Petrel (Ocean) provide any mechanisms for IPC or should we develop our own architecture for communications between managed plugin code and native app process?
For most Petrel data, it is only safe to modify them inside the main thread of a Petrel plug-in.
If you already have a native process that does the number crunching, you will need to implement your own way to share the data between the plug-in and the native process. Eclipse does this by file sharing. If the overhead of IPC outweigh the actual computation, you may want to consider refactoring the native process to make it run inside the plug-in.