[Beowulf] Update on dealing with Spectre and Meltdown

[James Cuff]

> Prentice Bisbal <pbisbal at pppl.gov> wrote:
>
>> Beowulfers,
>>
>> Have any of you updated the kernels on your clusters to fix the
>> Spectre and Meltdown vulnerabilities? I was following this issue
>> closely for the first couple of weeks. There seemed to be a lack of
>> consensus on how much these fixed would impact HPC jobs, and if I
>> recall correctly, some of the patches really hurt performance, or
>> caused other problems. We took a wait-and-see approach here. So now
>> that I've waited a while, what did you see?


Hi all,

Interesting analysis by my new mentor Tim over here at The Next
Platform, especially around I/O challenges:

https://twitter.com/jamesdotcuff/status/974721256481226752

Love his editorial note:

"We will say it again: Run your own tests before and after applying
the Spectre and Meltdown patches"

Best,

j.

--
Dr. James Cuff
The Next Platform

https://twitter.com/jamesdotcuff
https://linkedin.com/in/jamesdotcuff