Risk Modeling with Condor at The Hartford Condor Week March 15, 2005 Bob Nordlund The Hartford

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  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