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

[Scott Atchley]

I saw that article as well. It seems like they are targeting using RISC-V
to build an accelerator. One could argue that you do not need speculation
within a GPU-like accelerator, but you have to get your performance from
very wide execution units with lots of memory requests in flight as a GPU
does today.

On Tue, Jul 17, 2018 at 8:19 AM, John Hearns via Beowulf <
beowulf at beowulf.org> wrote:

> 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
>>>
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>>
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>
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