ARCHIVE

Industry leader announces new option for high-performance computing: Milliman, Inc., the international firm of consultants and actuaries, announced today that it has teamed with Microsoft Corp. to provide a highly scalable, cost-effective cluster computing solution to clients in the life insurance and financial services industries. Advances in financial modeling and risk analysis within these industries are creating a huge demand for additional computing capacity. Milliman has enhanced their MG-ALFA application to integrate with Windows Compute Cluster Server (WCCS) 2003, delivering a new option for high performance computing (HPC) for financial modeling to help insurance and financial firms gain greater confidence in their decision-making. MG-ALFA is a financial projection software product developed and supported by Milliman and used by top life insurance and financial firms worldwide to support product development, financial reporting, risk management and decision analysis. MG-ALFA supports complex stochastic and nested-stochastic projections, which can require hundreds of hours of computing time without grid computing. The integration of MG-ALFA with Microsoft's WCCS allows seamless distribution of jobs to clusters ranging from a single node to several hundred simultaneously. The option to seamlessly distribute the work to multiple machines provides a practical solution to completing the analysis in a timely and reliable manner. "Windows Compute Cluster Server provides our clients with a grid computing option that can scale to meet the increasing needs of the industry and is simple to deploy and operate. We are excited to be working with Microsoft to provide this option," said Dennis Stanley, the MG-ALFA Chief Architect. Until now, the cost and expertise required to deploy and maintain HPC clusters has been a barrier for many insurance firms. The challenge is to deliver a solution that seamlessly integrates actuarial tools with a Windows- based HPC platform that is cost-effective, easy to deploy and maintain, and allows companies to leverage their existing Windows-based infrastructure and expertise. WCCS solves that problem with an easy-to-use platform for deploying, developing and accessing dedicated HPC clusters. With essential management tools and integration with Microsoft Visual Studio, WCCS helps reduce cost and complexity with a solution that is simple to deploy, operate and integrate with existing IT infrastructure investments. A Windows-based cluster supports integration with desktop applications to provide cost-effective scale-out capabilities. Through the solution's integrated Job Scheduler, both job creation and submission can be performed directly from a desk-side application, providing a fully integrated experience for the end user. The combination of WCCS and MG-ALFA provides insurance and financial firms a solution to maximize their hardware and software investments. "Competitive pressures in the life insurance industry are driving increased complexity in products and analysis, requiring more sophisticated actuarial tools and dedicated high-performance computing capability," said Bill Hartnett, U.S. insurance industry solutions director for Microsoft. "Microsoft is proud to team with Milliman to provide a scalable solution that empowers actuaries within firms to make quick and accurate decisions around risk analysis."