[gpfsug-discuss] Meltdown, Spectre, and impacts on GPFS

[Skylar Thompson]

While I'm not fully versed on the vulnerability or the proposed fixes,
my understanding is that most of the performance impact from the fix is
around having kernel memory completely separately from a process's
user-space, which means every system call will have cache/TLB misses.
This might mean clusters which are using RDMA won't have as big of a
performance hit versus ones that aren't able to use RDMA, since they can
do a lot more in user-space without involving the kernel.

On 01/04/2018 09:57 AM, Buterbaugh, Kevin L wrote:
> Happy New Year everyone,
>
> I’m sure that everyone is aware of Meltdown and Spectre by now … we,
> like many other institutions, will be patching for it at the earliest
> possible opportunity.
>
> Our understanding is that the most serious of the negative performance
> impacts of these patches will be for things like I/O (disk / network)
> … given that, we are curious if IBM has any plans for a GPFS update
> that could help mitigate those impacts?  Or is there simply nothing
> that can be done?
>
> If there is a GPFS update planned for this we’d be interested in
> knowing so that we could coordinate the kernel and GPFS upgrades on
> our cluster.
>
> Thanks…
>
> Kevin
>
> P.S.  The “Happy New Year” wasn’t intended as sarcasm … I hope it is a
> good year for everyone despite how it’s starting out.  :-O
>
> —
> Kevin Buterbaugh - Senior System Administrator
> Vanderbilt University - Advanced Computing Center for Research and
> Education
> Kevin.Buterbaugh at vanderbilt.edu
> <mailto:Kevin.Buterbaugh at vanderbilt.edu> - (615)875-9633
>
>
>
>
>
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-- 
-- Skylar Thompson (skylar2 at u.washington.edu)
-- Genome Sciences Department, System Administrator
-- Foege Building S046, (206)-685-7354

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