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Risk Modeling with Condor at The Hartford

Learn how The Hartford implemented Condor to improve their risk modeling process, increase scalability, and enhance productivity. Discover the benefits, challenges, and future directions of utilizing Condor in the insurance industry.

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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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