CHICAGO, Dec. 4 -- Four leading companies in high-performance computing (HPC), with insurance industry expertise, are offering an Insurance Enterprise Acceleration Webinar at 10 a.m. CST on Thursday, Dec. 13, to demonstrate how open source grid or cluster systems can accelerate insurance industry IT processing.

Experts from Sun Microsystems, AMD, Univa UD and Diamond Consulting will participate in the 45-minute Web session, which addresses how insurance-specific computing challenges in the areas of enterprise risk management and predictive modeling can be met with state-of-the-art open source products.

“Faced with a range of IT challenges, many insurance companies are turning to grid and cluster technology, but they find existing proprietary products arduous to implement and too expensive to operate and maintain,” says Carl Kesselman of Univa UD, recognized globally as a father of grid computing. “The answer to this conundrum is to leverage open source grid and cluster solutions that provide more productive and far less costly ways to accelerate an insurer’s ability to data mine for claims, run historical data and perform greater complex calculative analyses for alternative rates.”

“Insurance companies should be looking at grid approached to reduce processing timeframes and get to market faster with their products,” says Jay Ruffin of Diamond Consulting, an insurance industry consulting firm and systems integrator. “In addition, by choosing a supported open source approach, companies can keep costs down while enjoying all the benefits of a proven and reliable technology solution.”

This insurance industry Webinar is targeted for decision makers and innovators who want to identify scale-out inefficiencies and instruct internal businesses how to leverage a robust, scalable and dynamic infrastructure based on proven, award-winning technology.

The agenda will cover insurance industry computing challenges, advantages of an open source grid approach, usage scenarios within insurance computing, enterprise risk management, predictive modeling, architecture requirements and how to get started.

Presenters during the free Webinar will include:

• Dr. Carl Kesselman, co-founder and chief scientist, Univa UD.

• Jay Ruffin, principal, Diamond Consulting.

• Ramesh Joginpalli, division manager, Commercial Solutions Group, AMD.

• Dave Teszler, U.S. practice manager for HPC, Sun Microsystems.

Participants should register free at www.univaud.com/insurancewebinar/registration-form.php. To learn more, go to www.univaud.com/insurancewebinar.

About Univa UD

Univa UD is the leading provider of open source products for grid and cluster computing environments. The company’s industrial-strength offerings range from departmental and HPC cluster management to enterprise-wide grids, and represent the proven and cost-effective alternative to traditional proprietary products that customers have been waiting for. Based on a combination of open source and proprietary components, Univa UD offerings include a downloadable open source cluster management product, a proprietary cluster product with rich functionality, and a comprehensive enterprise grid product based on award-winning technology. All Univa UD products are run by Fortune 1000 companies in large-scale, production environments. Univa UD is headquartered in Lisle, Ill., with offices in Austin, Texas. For more information, contact visit www.univaud.com.