Meeting Insurers’ HPC Needs From End To End

Many insurers want to partner with a large IT company that can provide an end-to-end High-Performance Computing (HPC) solution. Teri DeWalt, HPC Financial Services Marketing Manager, and Alan McCarter, HPC Financial Services Sales Executive at IBM talk about the company’s complete offering, which includes consulting and implementation services, hardware, middleware, and cloud computing.

WFS: How does IBM help customers migrate from a workstation environment to a HPC cluster?

TD: We do that through our Actuarial Grid and Grow solution. A consultant advises the customer on what tools and platforms are needed to make the transition from a workstation to a HPC grid-enabled environment. We then create a HPC cluster server infrastructure that one or more users can access remotely. When we say “remotely,” we mean the environment can be located anywhere – in a local office, data center or even offsite. We recommend that clients buy HPC clusters for average workload requirements and then supplement with IBM enterprise-class cloud computing offerings such as IBM® Computing on Demand (CoD). 

AM: Customers can extend their private grid into an IBM CoD cloud center, and run on a significantly greater number of compute servers than they have in-house. We use best practice methodologies to optimize the client’s application environment and infrastructure. Essentially we take their familiar desktop application, or an enhanced platform of their choice, and help them migrate this environment to a powerful grid-enabled, HPC environment built on Microsoft® Windows HPC Server 2008®. This enables them to run more simulations and make better decisions based on their analyses. 

WFS: Can you talk more about your range of offerings?

TD: IBM offers an office-level HPC cluster, Blade-Center® S, which is extremely efficient, economical, and quiet. At the other end of the spectrum, we offer the innovative, dense, and energy efficient System x™ iDataPlex™ for customers that need to scale out to hundreds or even thousands of servers.  

WFS: Can you tell us more about the IBM cloud?

AM: IBM has offered cloud computing solutions for many years. IBM CoD was launched in 2003. About 90% of our CoD customers are in the financial services industry, and several are insurers. They have the flexibility to tap into our secure environment and access computing power when they need it. Most customers run mission-critical and real-time tasks in-house, and they use our cloud for cyclical workloads that are not latency sensitive such as pricing, cash flow testing, reserve modeling, and hedging.  

WFS: Can you talk about a client that has run in your center? 

TD: Sure, a leading international wealth management company has been running in our CoD center for the past six months. This client experienced a 5x increase in HPC computing requirements when implementing a new European regulatory requirement called Market-Consistent Embedded Value (MCEV) Principles. This company had a constrained in-house infrastructure, and they only needed to access a large compute cluster two to three weeks in a given month. They concluded that running this workload on a Windows-based cluster in an IBM CoD center was the most cost-effective way to meet these requirements.   

Cloud computing is cost-effective because customers just pay for the cycles they need when they need it. Some insurers consistently utilize our cloud computing center from one to three weeks per month, and they have reduced IT costs by as much as 60%. 

WFS: Why IBM?

TD: IBM offers a total solution to meet insurers’ end-to-end requirements. Security is a top priority in our data centers and infrastructure services. Moreover, IBM can support clients’ global operations through seven CoD cloud data centers located in London, Tokyo and New York. We encourage insurers to give Windows HPC Server and CoD a test drive! 

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