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Risk Modeling with Condor at The Hartford. Condor Week March 15, 2005. Bob Nordlund The Hartford [email protected]. About The Hartford…. Almost 200 years old (founded in 1810) $18 billion 2003 revenues $250 billion assets under management 30,000 employees worldwide - PowerPoint PPT Presentation
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Risk Modeling with Condor at The Hartford
Condor WeekMarch 15, 2005
Bob NordlundThe [email protected]
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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!
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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.
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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
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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
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Daily Production Hedging Jobs
72 268 478
2390
4780
12000
0
2000
4000
6000
8000
10000
12000
Q32004
Q42004
Q12005
Q22005
Q32005
Q42005
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Daily Analytical Jobs
01500 15050 30100
101000
250100
0
50000
100000
150000
200000
250000
300000
Q32004
Q42004
Q12005
Q22005
Q32005
Q42005
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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.
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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
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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.
