CCR measures impact of Meltdown & Spectre patches on HPC applications

CCR staff members rapidly worked to secure the CCR servers as soon as security patches were released to address the Intel vulnerabilities nicknamed Meltdown and Spectre.  After patching the development systems, our scientists quickly jumped into measurement mode where they worked to identify the possible effects on performance caused by the kernel patching.  Popular scientific applications and HPC benchmarks were used in the testing.  A research paper on initial findings was written and then featured on HPC Wire, a publication dedicated to the field of high performance computing.  A larger scale analysis is being conducted since the production clusters have been patched.

More details about the vulnerabilities can be found in these articles:

Wired.com

The RegisterRedHat - Speculative Execution Exploit Performance Impacts - Describing the performance impacts to security patches for CVE-2017-5754 CVE-2017-5753 and CVE-2017-5715