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Another milestone has been reached in both the numbering of AXIS releases, and more importantly with the continual addition of functionality and features available within AXIS.  With the release of AXIS 12 in February, 2007, the flexibility, power and convenience of AXIS has increased to new levels yet again.

Here are some highlights of the benefits of AXIS 12 available with its first release:

More Stochastic Processing Functionality Released

The power, convenience and application of Stochastic Processing features has taken another leap forward in AXIS 12. The powerful Stochastic Processing module was originally introduced in 2004 in AXIS 11.2, and was limited to analysis at a single point in time, typically the valuation date. Since then, the Stochastic Processing module has increased in flexibility and convenience, with wider application throughout AXIS. Now AXIS 12 introduces improved features to embed stochastic analysis at multiple future points in the projection period, thus opening the door to the practical application of true stochastic-on-stochastic functionality.

Increased Convenience and Control with GridLink

AXIS users have communicated a growing demand for fast turnaround of large AXIS applications, both traditional deterministic calculations and evolving stochastic analysis. This has resulted in increased use of dedicated server farms as departmental or corporate resources, and with this has come the demand for tighter security of production environments, coupled with the need to better manage these resources for the convenience of multiple users. GridLink has responded to this challenge with more functionality, stability and ease of use, delivered with GGY's consistently responsive client support for user IT departments.

Two key features introduced in version 2.30 of GridLink are:

1. Active backup
2. GridLink support for System Batches

New Reserve Method Objects

Because reserves in AXIS are so flexibly defined, in version 11, there were a myriad of switches in each Reserve section that modified the basic Reserve Method selected. With the need to support GAAP, Statutory and Tax methods, current, as well as historical methods used in Canada, United States, Asia and other jurisdictions, Reserve Assumption sections in AXIS Cells were getting quite long. Since each company tends to look at a given reserve method in a consistent way across its product lines, we decided to move these assumptions into a new object called the Reserve Method. 

The Reserve Method object now allows you to create and name a small number of Reserve Methods for various purposes, and use these consistently in all liability cells, thus increasing control and convenience, while reducing the size of AXIS cells considerably. Note that the Reserve Method deals with methodology issues controlled by switches, and not with any reserve assumptions which currently remain in the Cell.

In order to convert datasets saved in prior versions of AXIS for use with AXIS 12, it is necessary for AXIS to create new Reserve Methods automatically reflecting all combinations of switches used in each dataset. Users will likely want to plan for this conversion and allow time to implement appropriate naming and protection of Reserve Methods in their datasets before moving to AXIS 12 throughout a department or company. GGY Client Support is happy to provide additional guidance on this transition.

Multiple Life Joint Life Policies in Universal Life

In the Universal Life module, AXIS already supports two-life joint life policies, both first to die and last to die, with the capability to specify issue ages and mortality tables explicitly for each life. AXIS applies a frazierization to the assumed mortality rates by life for pricing and for valuation purposes, and will perform similar calculations to produce joint life premiums and joint life risk charges based on to lives.  

New functionality in AXIS 12 opens up the option to specify as many as 10 separate lives as being insured together under a joint life first to die or last to die Universal Life policy, provided that the lives are modeled as in force lives in the seriatim data passed to the Cell from DataLink.

Risk Classes and Rules Tables

Risk Class Objects and Rules Tables were first introduced in AXIS 11.4 under a beta feature code to permit testing and further development. With the release of AXIS 12 in February 2007, the beta has been removed from these powerful new objects, allowing them to be used by anyone, without special feature code authorization.

Risk Classes and Rules Tables open up powerful new approaches to defining assumptions in a coordinated and more controlled fashion among related Cells, and may assist in dramatically reducing the number of Cells needed in a given Dataset which models in force business.

With no major structural change incorporated in AXIS 12, version upgrades are expected to be as smooth and straightforward as ever. However, you should review the new features included in any release before converting to be sure you are prepared for changes to assumption screens and the way key objects are used and defined. 

A prime example of this is the introduction of the new Reserve Method object in AXIS 12, which will significantly improve the management and maintenance of reserve methods used in a dataset.  However it will also impact all Liability Module Cells, and require the creation of appropriately named new objects and thus may be more efficiently managed by preparing datasets in advance for the conversion of user data which AXIS 12 will automatically perform.

For assistance with, or more information about any aspect of upgrading to AXIS 12, contact GGY Client Support.

We are currently working on having AXIS produce information from an EBS run that will allow detailed analysis of experience by decrement assumption. Using the actual transactions passed into AXIS through DataLink as well as assumptions in the cells, seriatim output will be produced for census information, expected claims and actual claims all broken down by duration and calendar year. This will enable both actual vs. expected and actual rate calculation studies to be performed. Each study can be performed on a calendar year as well as on a duration basis. For disabled lives, duration is defined using disability durations as set up in the termination rate tables in the cell. All other studies refer to duration on a policy year basis.

Stay tuned for further details or contact David Fihrer for any questions.

For those big production runs, there are never enough hours in the day, and deadlines are tight. Maybe you are running millions of seriatim policies or perhaps you are running some Variable Annuities through thousands of scenarios, or perhaps a combination of both. You may be using, or thinking of using, the distributed processing features in AXIS or the GridLink module. You may even consider sending your datasets to GGY to run on our farm.

GGY devotes a great deal of resources to improving the scalability of AXIS on Processor Farms. This article is designed to keep you up to date with the latest developments in all these areas.

Changes in Hardware

The first way in which we can help you is by keeping you up to date on the latest new processors from Intel and AMD. This used to be a fairly steady process, but the last year or so has seen breakthroughs from both companies, with Intel’s Quad-Core chips currently claiming the high ground. The running order may well be reversed later in the year when AMD introduces its next generation Quad-Core Opteron processor.

If you are sitting on computers over two years old the latest Quad-Core Intel processor has probably at least five times the processing power. We do our best to keep you informed by commenting on and benchmarking these new processors on a timely basis. For example, a Xeon X5355 (2.6GHz) can process in 55 seconds what an older 3.6GHz Xeon (2MB cache) can process in 350 seconds.

Check out our Recommended Equipment page:

www.ggy.com/support/reqequip.asp

I also invite you to call me personally for up to the minute advice for any purchasing decisions, especially if it involves setting up a processor farm. We have been able to save our clients a lot of money and perhaps we can do the same for you, since we have an intimate understanding of which components have the biggest impact on AXIS performance, scalability and robustness, and we do not charge for this advice.

You can reach me at 416 250 6777 x 224 or by email at Phil.Gold@ggy.com

Grid Computing

We introduced AXIS GridLink in late 2005 to manage processor farms. Although we are the Developers of AXIS GridLink, we are also one of its largest users. We have a 16-core Opteron farm and a new 64-core Xeon farm, which is, if you can believe it, less than 8 inches high. This new Xeon farm has over 6 times the capacity of our Opteron farm, in exactly the same space.

Why do we need it? We set up both farms for the same reason, to help us develop and improve GridLink. We run many large scale tests on these farms, and these experiments allow us to improve the scalability and performance of AXIS for our users, and to make sure it runs reliably. We can merge the farms together to produce an 80-core farm. And we can also easily add another 48 cores from our developers’ workstations to create a single 128-core farm when the need arises. We also have separate farms for nightly testing and automated developer testing, all of which run under GridLink.

Recent Enhancements to GridLink

We have added some major features to GridLink recently. Here are the highlights:

• We have changed GridLink from an application to a service, enabling simpler administration and recovery.
• GridLink can now easily deploy AXIS versions onto all or specified machines in your farm.
• GridLink now features Access Groups, allowing higher levels of Security between users on the farm.
• GridLink can now schedule safe farm backups through a feature called Active Backup.
• GridLink can now process System Batch Jobs as well as Dataset batch jobs.

More details can be found in these two links:

• Major enhancements to AXIS GridLink (April - December 2006)

www.ggy.com/support/kbase/kbdetails.asp?articleid=569

• More features added to GridLink (February 2007)

www.ggy.com/support/kbase/whatsnewdetail.asp?artid=574

Industry Standard Grids

Some of our clients have set up Enterprise Grid Solutions using technology from Platform Computing or DataSynapse. GGY has been working to integrate AXIS GridLink with both of these Enterprise Grid Solutions. This integration means that one or more AXIS GridLink farms can happily coexist with other Grid-enabled software. This can allow you to leverage your hardware costs over a number of different applications. More details will be available on the GGY website shortly.

Renting the GGY Farm

We can rent out space and time on our two Processor Farms on a first come first served basis, and you can also reserve capacity at peak periods in advance. So you can consider renting time on our farm as a convenient spillover option.

We are usually able to be flexible and responsive to our clients’ needs by rescheduling our own testing to non-peak periods. Now that we have a total of seven times our original capacity, we can tackle jobs that are too big to run in your own offices, and we can often provide a quicker turnaround than would be available in your own production areas.

Recent changes in the AXIS Stochastic Processing module allow you to run unlimited numbers of scenarios within the required memory of 1 GB per processor core. If you would like to process more scenarios than before, but do not have the capacity to do so, this is another good reason to check out the GGY Processor Farms.

More details are available online here:

www.ggy.com/support/kbase/kbdetails.asp?searchterm=&articleid=433

Transferring Large Amounts of Data

Along with this increased capacity we have also increased our internet bandwidth by a factor of 6 and redesigned the GGY web file upload utility to handle larger files.   The combination of more bandwidth and the new upload utility mean that you can now securely upload files of up to 1 gigabyte in size at speeds of up to 1.25 megabytes per second.   You can then download your results from GGY with the same speed and security.   We will provide you with a personalized download page that has a unique URL address known only to you.

While there are virtually no restrictions anymore on our side in terms of being able to receive large files, there may be limitations on the uploads established at your end. To help you send us large files we have added an option to the dataset backup tool in AXIS that allows you to span the ZIP file over multiple smaller files while backing up the dataset. More details can be found online:

www.ggy.com/support/enhancebug/upddetail.asp?id=10443&sequence=0

The Output Manager

We have also developed a very powerful tool in AXIS called the Output Manager. This allows you to get a very quick overview of all the outputs configured in the dataset and easily re-target them to new destinations. This helps us as well. When we receive the dataset from you we can quickly re-configure all required outputs to our farm drives. This way you do not need to do any extra preparations before sending us your data to run.

The Future

Our Systems Design team is working flat out to bring you the highest performance software and to make it as easy as possible to use. Much of the development work involves the support of processor farms and we have built up a large amount of experience and expertise. We are very happy to share that with you when it comes to setting up your own production environments and we look forward to hearing from you.

Feel free to call Victor Rubinstein [416 250 6777 x237], Jeffrey Wei [x236] or myself Phil Gold [x224] at any time.