Are We Witnessing the Spectre of an HPC Meltdown? Veronica´ G. Vergara Larrea, Michael J. Brim, Wayne Joubert, Swen Boehm, Matthew Baker, Oscar Hernandez, Sarp Oral, James Simmons, and Don Maxwell Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Oak Ridge, TN 37830 Email: fvergaravg,brimmj,joubert,boehms,bakermb,oscar,oralhs,simmonsja,
[email protected] Abstract—We measure and analyze the performance ob- applications that perform a large number of system calls served when running applications and benchmarks before and (e.g., I/O operations). Furthermore, the performance impacts after the Meltdown and Spectre fixes have been applied to the are expected to vary depending on the parallel file system Cray supercomputers and supporting systems at the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility (OLCF). Of particular interest used (e.g., GPFS vs Lustre). is the effect of these fixes on applications selected from the In this work, performance results obtained from user OLCF portfolio when running at scale. This comprehensive facing systems, including Cray supercomputers at the Oak study presents results from experiments run on Titan, Eos, Ridge Leadership Computing Facility (OLCF) are presented. Cumulus, and Percival supercomputers at the OLCF. The This study includes experiments conducted on Titan (Cray results from this study are useful for HPC users running on Cray supercomputers, and serve to better understand the XK7), Eos (Intel Sandy Bridge Cray XC30), Cumulus (Intel impact that these two vulnerabilities have on diverse HPC Broadwell Cray XC40), and Percival (Intel Knights Landing workloads at scale. Cray XC40) supercomputers, as well as supporting systems. Keywords-high performance computing; performance analy- The applications and benchmarks used for these experiments sis; security vulnerabilities; Spectre; Meltdown; are selected from the acceptance test plans for each system.