Meltdown and Spectre bugs: Difference between revisions

Many groups around the world, including within Compute Canada, are running various benchmarks. Certain figures that have been cited are alarming (up to a 30% or even 50% performance hit), while others are very minimal. Programs which do a lot of input/output (reading and writing files) seem to be most heavily affected by the patches released thus far. Examples of such software include databases or performing a file transfer (e.g. rsync). In general a typical high performance computing job should not be affected nearly as much since the vast majority of the runtime is spent computing rather than doing input and output. Different processor generations are also affected to different degrees, with older processors being those with the most notable performance degradation. If you suspect your jobs may incur a large performance penalty, we recommend that you compare its performance before and after. You can also contact our [[Technical support]] to get help, but keep in mind that code modification may be required to lessen the performance impact on any given code.