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Meltdown and Spectre bugs: Difference between revisions
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Many groups around the world, including within Compute Canada, are running benchmarks to evaluate the effects of the operating system patches on performance. Certain figures that have been cited are alarming (up to a 30% or even 50% performance hit), while others are very minimal. | Many groups around the world, including within Compute Canada, are running benchmarks to evaluate the effects of the operating system patches on performance. Certain figures that have been cited are alarming (up to a 30% or even 50% performance hit), while others are very minimal. | ||
Tasks which involve a lot of input/output (reading and writing files) seem to be most heavily affected. Examples include databases, or file transfers (e.g. rsync). Most high performance computing jobs should be minimally affected since the vast majority of the run time is spent computing rather than doing input and output. Different processor generations are also affected to different degrees, with the most notable performance degradation reported for older processors | Tasks which involve a lot of input/output (reading and writing files) seem to be most heavily affected. Examples include databases, or file transfers (e.g. rsync). Most high performance computing jobs should be minimally affected since the vast majority of the run time is spent computing rather than doing input and output. Different processor generations are also affected to different degrees, with the most notable performance degradation reported for older processors. | ||
In the References section below you will find links to some recent performance comparisons. Keep in mind that these were not necessarily run on hardware and operating systems similar to what Compute Canada clusters are running. | |||
== What is Compute Canada doing about it ? == | == What is Compute Canada doing about it ? == | ||
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== What should I do about it ? == | == What should I do about it ? == | ||
Security-wise, please rest assured that Compute Canada team members are taking every action possible to ensure that systems we run are secure. If you are operating your own virtual machine in our cloud, you are however responsible for updating its operating system to include the latest security patches (see next subsection) | Security-wise, please rest assured that Compute Canada team members are taking every action possible to ensure that systems we run are secure. '''If you are operating your own virtual machine''' in our cloud, you are however responsible for updating its operating system to include the latest security patches (see next subsection). | ||
Performance-wise, if you believe that your application may be severely impacted by the security patches, please contact our [[Technical support]] team. We encourage you to bring forward comparative performance numbers of your application (job run times before and after the announcement, for example). Keep in mind however that mitigating the performance impact of the security patches is likely to require some modification to the code you are running, and may not always be possible. | |||
=== I have a virtual machine running on the Compute Canada Cloud === | === I have a virtual machine running on the Compute Canada Cloud === | ||
Update your virtual machine's operating system to the latest version frequently over the coming days to ensure it has the latest security patches to address these bugs. See [[Security_considerations_when_running_a_VM#Updating_your_VM|updating your VM]] for specific instructions on how to update Linux VMs. | |||
== References == | == References == | ||