Title: Effect of Meltdown and Spectre Patches on the Performance of HPC Applications,
Abstract: In this work we examine how the updates addressing Meltdown and Spectre
vulnerabilities impact the performance of HPC applications. To study this we
use the application kernel module of XDMoD to test the performance before and
after the application of the vulnerability patches. We tested the performance
difference for multiple application and benchmarks including: NWChem, NAMD,
HPCC, IOR, MDTest and IMB. The results show that although some specific
functions can have performance decreased by as much as 74%, the majority of
individual metrics indicates little to no decrease in performance. The
real-world applications show a 2-3% decrease in performance for single node
jobs and a 5-11% decrease for parallel multi node jobs.