Condor In Flight at The Hartford 2006 Transformations Condor Week 2007 Bob Nordlund

About The Hartford… Headquartered in Hartford, CT Founded in 1810 Fortune ,000 employees worldwide $26.5 billion revenues $2.9 billion core earnings $377.6 billion assets under management

The Hartford’s Businesses Property & Casualty Auto, home, marine, workers compensation, etc. Retail Investment Products Variable and fixed annuities, mutual funds, 529 college savings plans Retirement Plans 401(k), 403(b), 457 Institutional Financial Solutions Individual Life Insurance Group Benefits International

A Brief History… Exponential growth in risk modeling activity exceeded existing computing capabilities. Grid technology was identified as a possible solution. A pilot program with a commercial grid provider was started. In parallel, a ‘skunkworks’ Condor implementation was evaluated as an alternate approach. Condor was selected over the commercial provider. Windows Support Simple, Scalable, and Flexible Active Community Free

2006 Transformations GRAPE Condor 6.8 Upgrade Accounting and Usage Reporting GridMC User Community

GRAPE Challenge (Global Risk Analysis Projection Enhancement) Prepare comprehensive risk analysis report for all products for investment analysts. Run three orders of magnitude more projections through the system. Perform stochastic on stochastic on stochastic analysis. 2.4 billion individual simulations.

GRAPE IT Response Infrastructure 500 dual-core, dual-CPU AMD servers 20 Racks Dedicated GigE switches Condor pool with HAD 4 filers with 8TB of storage Purchased, installed and configured in 6 weeks Application Java-based liability model 75x performance gain Meta-scheduling application In-memory market scenario generation

Condor 6.8 Upgrade Dual version Condor MSI installation Centralized configuration management Multiple schedulers 6.8 shadow process overhead Load balancing scripts Scheduler coordination Accounting Groups SOAP based submission Mixed Linux Scheduler/Windows Execute High Availability Central Managers desktops, notebooks, and workstations

Accounting and Usage Reporting

GridMC (Grid Management Console) Web-based view of the grid Administrative tools Configuration management Policy management Condor Daemon Management User-priority / Group Quota Management User tools Job submission Job control Prioritization Job Monitoring Grid utilization Usage Reporting

User Community Weekly user group meetings to discuss issues, planned usage, allocation trading. Users own the grid, IT provides care and feeding Promote ‘good’ behavior by highlighting ‘bad’ behavior. Users who don’t want to share can’t take advantage of others who do – and are prominently displayed on usage graphs as ‘exclusive’. Shame and ridicule can be effective tools to manage a grid. Avoid draconian policies by providing transparency to users and letting a cooperative community evolve.

Our Condor Environment… In production since 2004 Three pools (GRAPE, GA, Test) Dedicated and non-dedicated execute nodes ~1000 Two-socket, dual-core HP x86 servers ~1000 desktops, notebooks Linux central managers with HAD Linux and Windows schedulers Windows execute nodes

Conclusion The GRAPE project won The Hartford’s 2006 Chairman’s Award Condor has been a transformational technology providing users access to capabilities they wouldn’t have otherwise had – or can now live without. Grid computing is an integral part of our business and places The Hartford in a leadership position with respect to risk analysis in our industry. Condor has proven to be an invaluable asset and has time and again handled whatever challenge we’ve thrown at it.

Thank you Condor Team!