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Risk Modeling with Condor at The Hartford

Risk Modeling with Condor at The Hartford. Condor Week March 15, 2005. Bob Nordlund The Hartford robert.nordlund@hartfordlife.com. About The Hartford…. Almost 200 years old (founded in 1810) $18 billion 2003 revenues $250 billion assets under management 30,000 employees worldwide

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Risk Modeling with Condor at The Hartford

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  1. Risk Modeling with Condor at The Hartford Condor Week March 15, 2005 Bob Nordlund The Hartford robert.nordlund@hartfordlife.com

  2. About The Hartford… • Almost 200 years old (founded in 1810) • $18 billion 2003 revenues • $250 billion assets under management • 30,000 employees worldwide • Diverse products • Property & Casualty Insurance • Individual and Group Life Insurance • Group Benefits • Individual Annuities • Not a technology company!

  3. The Need for Speed… • Changes in the reinsurance market necessitated an alternate approach to limiting our exposure - hedging. • In order to accurately hedge our book of business we needed to fully understand our liability position. • Current methods of liability modeling at The Hartford were inadequate to satisfy our auditors. • We needed more power – much more power, and quickly.

  4. Band-Aids… • Extend the master/worker capabilities of the current modeling tool. • Buy dedicated server-class hardware • Improve networking • Create policies and procedures to improve reliability • Results… • Largest distributed implementation of modeling tool in the world • Tested to 68 workers • Still not good enough. • Reliability concerns • Breaking new ground for scalability • Manually intensive operation

  5. The Promise of Grid… • In Q2 of 2003, a commercial grid provider approached us with an integrated solution for our modeling tool. • Infinite scalability • Full recoverability • Integrated • Not a production release • Very expensive • At the same time, we hedged our technology bet with an in-house solution using Condor. • Scalable • Mature • Flexible • Free • Supports Windows

  6. And the Winner is Condor… • The commercial solution was not delivered to our satisfaction. • Condor met every expectation for performance, reliability, scalability, and ease of use. • Condor had excellent support for Windows. • Condor licensing was flexible and affordable.

  7. Pitching Condor… • Free software is not always an easy sale. • FUD from vendors can be very effective. • Who do you blame? • Where do you get support? • Who can I call? • Mitigating Factors • The community on the condor-user list provided better support than most vendor support options. • UW offered paid support options. • Our prototype implementation worked. • Potential cost savings could not be ignored.

  8. Condor at The Hartford • Initial production hedging implementation in Q3 of 2004. • Grown from 12 dedicated HP DL360 G3 2 processor servers to 200. • Added a secondary pool for non-production analytical jobs. • Produces and analyzes 4TB of data per month. • Runs 100K+ analytical jobs per month.

  9. Daily Production Hedging Jobs

  10. Daily Analytical Jobs

  11. Future Directions • Improve our Condor environment. • End-user automation • Multiple pools • Improved security • Better policies • Accounting • Extend our use of Condor to non-dedicated hardware. • 1,000+ file servers unused or underutilized after business hours • 800+ application and database servers • 25,000+ desktops • Create new modeling applications to exploit Condor features. • Master/Worker • Checkpointing • Find new applications for Condor throughout the company.

  12. What We’d Like in Condor • Hot failover capability for all Condor subsystems • Integration strategy for alerting and monitoring frameworks for both daemons and jobs. • Simplified end-user job submission and monitoring. • Graphical management console

  13. In Closing… • Condor is a terrific technology that will only grow in size and importance at The Hartford. • It has enabled unparalleled productivity gains in area of risk modeling. • As more applications for the technology are identified more devoted users are surely to follow.

  14. Thank you. Bob Nordlund The Hartford robert.nordlund@hartfordlife.com

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