Measuring the Impact of Spectre and Meltdown

TL;DR

This paper quantifies the performance impacts of Spectre and Meltdown vulnerabilities on high-performance computing workloads, revealing significant and widespread penalties that are hard to eliminate even in security-focused systems.

Contribution

It provides empirical measurements of Spectre and Meltdown's performance impacts across various HPC workloads, highlighting their severity and persistence.

Findings

Significant performance penalties observed in synthetic workloads.

Realistic HPC workloads also experience notable slowdowns.

Penalties are difficult to mitigate even in dedicated, security-prioritized systems.

Abstract

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.