Measuring the Impact of Spectre and Meltdown
This addresses the performance degradation problem for HPC system users, but it is incremental as it focuses on specific workloads rather than new solutions.
The paper measured the performance impact of Spectre and Meltdown mitigations on HPC workloads, finding significant penalties that are difficult to avoid even in systems where security is less critical.
The Spectre and Meltdown flaws in modern microprocessors represent a new class of attacks that have been difficult to mitigate. The mitigations that have been proposed have known performance impacts. The reported magnitude of these impacts varies depending on the industry sector and expected workload characteristics. In this paper, we measure the performance impact on several workloads relevant to HPC systems. We show that the impact can be significant on both synthetic and realistic workloads. We also show that the performance penalties are difficult to avoid even in dedicated systems where security is a lesser concern.