Milliman Inc., an international consulting and actuarial firm,has teamed with Microsoft Corp. to provide a scalable,cost-effective cluster computing solution to clients in the lifeinsurance and financial services industries. Advances in financialmodeling and risk analysis within these industries are creating ademand for additional computing capacity. Milliman has enhanced itsMG-ALFA application to integrate with Windows Compute ClusterServer (WCCS) 2003, delivering a new option for high-performancecomputing (HPC) for financial modeling to help insurance andfinancial firms.

MG-ALFA is a financial projection software product developed andsupported by Milliman and used by life insurance and financialfirms to support product development, financial reporting, riskmanagement, and decision analysis. MG-ALFA supports complexstochastic and nested-stochastic projections, which can requirehundreds of hours of computing time without grid computing. Theintegration of MG-ALFA with Microsoft's WCCS allows seamlessdistribution of jobs to clusters ranging from a single node toseveral hundred simultaneously. The option to distribute the workto multiple machines provides a practical solution to completingthe analysis in a timely and reliable manner.

"Windows Compute Cluster Server provides our clients with a gridcomputing option that can scale to meet the increasing needs of theindustry and is simple to deploy and operate," says Dennis Staley,the MG-ALFA chief architect.

"Competitive pressures in the life insurance industry aredriving increased complexity in products and analysis, requiringmore sophisticated actuarial tools and dedicated high-performancecomputing capability," says Bill Hartnett, U.S. insurance industrysolutions director for Microsoft. "Microsoft is proud to team withMilliman to provide a scalable solution that empowers actuarieswithin firms to make quick and accurate decisions around riskanalysis."