Case Study: Factors of a Successful Score Card Development
I discussed in a previous article how HPC helps in both the data mining phase and the production phase of score card system development. HPC helps to derive score card systems with higher predictive power, and HPC provides the infrastructure to deliver real-time response in production.
Now what factors contributes to a successful score card development?
A successful score card development project requires the involvement of many domain experts. A key task to success, which is often overlooked, is the development the project objective. Do I want the new score card system to help me select candidates who can increase their spending limit? Or do I want the new score card system to reduce delinquencies even at the expense of number of cards issued?
From an IT perspective, on the other hand, some key infrastructure questions crucial to project success are as below:
- How do I deploy and manage a big cluster?
- How do I troubleshoot and identify the root cause when there is an error condition?
- How do I develop an operator manual so that an operator with little privilege or domain knowledge can trigger the correct remedial action?
- How do I manage the cluster resources so that I have good utlization and there is no bottleneck in the infrastructure? For example, if I run a program on my grid using 512 cores concurrently, can I be sure I will overload my database and bring it down?
- How do I configure the cluster so that concurrent users with different service level agreements are all satisfied? How do I collect the performance data to plan for and justify my hardware and budget requirements?
06 Mar 2009, Kenneth Young