The following patches can be applied according to RHE's CVE:

• kernel-3.10.0-514.36.5.el7.x86_64.rpm
• linux-firmware-20160830-51.git7534e19.el7_3.noarch.rpm
• microcode_ctl-2.1-16.5.el7_3.x86_64.rpm

In order to quantify the impact of the Spectre / Meltdown fixes a number of tests have been run. Unless otherwise stated all results are from the Fidis cluster.

If all the recommended fixes are applied then we see a large impact on IO.  As computational kernels do not require frequent calls to the operating system the impact is far less significant.

GPFS IO Performance

IOR API=POSIX

IOR API=MPIIO

Comments

Impact is a loss of about 50% aggregate bandwidth when running IOR with one MPI task-per-node. 

Impact is much less visible when running IOR with 16 MPI tasks-per-node. 

Impact of 'Page Table Isolation (pti)' fix only

Situation of Fidis compute nodes after maintenance of January 24th, 2018:

Application Performance

MiniFE

Total running time in seconds on Fidis (lower is better)

Gear

Large test case. Steps per unit of time (higher is better)

CPMD

Average time per iteration in seconds (lower is better)

SPEC benchmark (CPU FP SPEED)

SPEC points (higher is better)

Quantum Espresso

espresso: version: 6.2.0
arch: platform: linux
platform_os: rhel7
target: x86_E5v4_Mellanox
compiler:
name: intel
version: 17.0.2
namespace: builtin
parameters:
elpa: true
hdf5: false
mpi: true
openmp: false
scalapack: true