[Beowulf] New Spectre attacks - no software mitigation - what impact for HPC?

John Hearns hearnsj at googlemail.com
Tue Jul 17 06:19:26 PDT 2018


This article is well worth a read, on European Exascale projects

https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/07/17/europes_exascale_supercomputer_chips/

The automotive market seems to have got mixed in there also!
The main thrust  dual ARM based and RISC-V

Also I like the plexiglass air shroud pictured at Barcelona. I saw
something similar at the HPE centre in Grenoble.
Damn good idea.







On 17 July 2018 at 13:07, Scott Atchley <e.scott.atchley at gmail.com> wrote:

> Hi Chris,
>
> They say that no announced silicon is vulnerable. Your link makes it clear
> that no ISA is immune if the implementation performs speculative execution.
> I think your point about two lines of production may make sense. Vendors
> will have to assess vulnerabilities and the performance trade-off.
>
> Personally, I do not see a large HPC system being built out of
> non-speculative hardware. You would need much more hardware to reach a
> level of performance and the additional power could lead to a lower
> performance per Watt (i.e., exceed the facility's power budget).
>
> Scott
>
> On Tue, Jul 17, 2018 at 2:33 AM, Chris Samuel <chris at csamuel.org> wrote:
>
>> On Tuesday, 17 July 2018 11:08:42 AM AEST Chris Samuel wrote:
>>
>> > Currently these new vulnerabilities are demonstrated on Intel & ARM, it
>> will
>> > be interesting to see if AMD is also vulnerable (I would guess so).
>>
>> Interestingly RISC-V claims immunity, and that looks like it'll be one of
>> the
>> two CPU architectures blessed by the Europeans in their Exascale project
>> (along with ARM).
>>
>> https://riscv.org/2018/01/more-secure-world-risc-v-isa/
>>
>> All the best,
>> Chris
>> --
>>  Chris Samuel  :  http://www.csamuel.org/  :  Melbourne, VIC
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> Beowulf mailing list, Beowulf at beowulf.org sponsored by Penguin Computing
>> To change your subscription (digest mode or unsubscribe) visit
>> http://www.beowulf.org/mailman/listinfo/beowulf
>>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> Beowulf mailing list, Beowulf at beowulf.org sponsored by Penguin Computing
> To change your subscription (digest mode or unsubscribe) visit
> http://www.beowulf.org/mailman/listinfo/beowulf
>
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://www.beowulf.org/pipermail/beowulf/attachments/20180717/6809e6b5/attachment.html>


More information about the Beowulf mailing list