Touchstone® incorporates the Microsoft© High Performance Computing (HPC) server to queue and manage jobs. HPC significantly improves performance, scalability, and productivity by leveraging a distributed computing environment that dramatically reduces run times. HPC includes a management console that monitors and maintains system stability and keeps track of the status of each job.

We collaborated with a team of Microsoft performance engineers to stress test Touchstone software. We performed loss analyses covering multiple regions, perils, and policy conditions using a variety of books ranging from a few hundred thousand to more than eight million locations. We ran multiple jobs simultaneously, scaling up to 40 servers with a total of 320 cores.

For large data sets, performance increased dramatically. A large residential book of exposure data took 9 hours to import, compared to 56 hours using CLASIC/2. Both trials used 8 cores. When the number of cores was increased to 12, the exposure data import time was reduced from 9 hours to 5.5 hours.