Meltdown and Spectre bugs: Difference between revisions
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Meltdown and Spectre are bugs related to speculative execution in a variety of CPU architectures developed during the past ten to fifteen years and which affect in particular processors from Intel and AMD, including those in use on Compute Canada clusters. A detailed discussion of the two bugs can be found on [https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2018/01/meltdown-and-spectre-every-modern-processor-has-unfixable-security-flaws/ this page] and Compute Canada personnel are currently patching all of the systems vulnerable to attacks based on these bugs. What sort of performance degradation users will observe as a consequence of the patches is dependent on the software you are using and how it interacts with the operating system but in general the more filesystem activity and other input/output operations that a program performs during its execution, the more likely it is to suffer from a slowdown. | Meltdown and Spectre are bugs related to speculative execution in a variety of CPU architectures developed during the past ten to fifteen years and which affect in particular processors from Intel and AMD, including those in use on Compute Canada clusters. A detailed discussion of the two bugs can be found on [https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2018/01/meltdown-and-spectre-every-modern-processor-has-unfixable-security-flaws/ this page] and Compute Canada personnel are currently patching all of the systems vulnerable to attacks based on these bugs. What sort of performance degradation users will observe as a consequence of the patches is dependent on the software you are using and how it interacts with the operating system but in general the more filesystem activity and other input/output operations that a program performs during its execution, the more likely it is to suffer from a slowdown. Some benchmarks of the performance loss for AI and machine learning codes are publicly [https://medium.com/implodinggradients/meltdown-c24a9d5e254e available] and we recommend that users consider running some simple tests of their own to see if there is any substantial loss of performance with their own code(s). | ||
Revision as of 19:31, 10 January 2018
Meltdown and Spectre are bugs related to speculative execution in a variety of CPU architectures developed during the past ten to fifteen years and which affect in particular processors from Intel and AMD, including those in use on Compute Canada clusters. A detailed discussion of the two bugs can be found on this page and Compute Canada personnel are currently patching all of the systems vulnerable to attacks based on these bugs. What sort of performance degradation users will observe as a consequence of the patches is dependent on the software you are using and how it interacts with the operating system but in general the more filesystem activity and other input/output operations that a program performs during its execution, the more likely it is to suffer from a slowdown. Some benchmarks of the performance loss for AI and machine learning codes are publicly available and we recommend that users consider running some simple tests of their own to see if there is any substantial loss of performance with their own code(s).