Milliman, Microsoft Team to Offer Life Insurers More Computer Capacity

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 life insurance and financial services industries. Advances in financial modeling and risk analysis within these industries are creating a demand for additional computing capacity. Milliman has enhanced its 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.

MG-ALFA is a financial projection software product developed and supported by Milliman and used by life insurance and financial firms 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 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," says Dennis Staley, the MG-ALFA chief architect.

"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," says 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."