Meltdown and Spectre vulnerabilities
As you probably have heard, two recently disclosed critical security vulnerabilities called Meltdown and Spectre affect all recent processors, including those in our clusters. Please refer to https://meltdownattack.com for more detailed information about the vulnerabilities.
We need to patch the cluster's operating system and apply some mitigations to address these vulnerabilities. This work will be done on the fly this week, without any interruption of service. However, the cluster’s computing capacity will be temporarily reduced and the longest queues will remain inactive while we update all compute nodes.
According to some news reports, the Meltdown patch may have a performance impact, although it is too early to tell how much it will affect the computations running on Euler. Our first priority right now is to guarantee the security of the cluster and its data.
Please understand that we can not and will not answer any questions about performance at this time.
Please watch this space for updates.
Updates
- 2018-01-10 13:45
- Since our functionality tests with the security patch have been successful we will start updating the Euler login nodes tomorrow 11. January, 09:00 AM. We will do it step by step so that there will be no interruption of service. At the same time we will start to patch compute nodes. This should not affect running jobs. We plan to open the long queues by the end of the week.
- 2018-01-12 09:00
- All Euler login nodes have been updated. We also started patching the compute nodes. The 120h queues have been activated, but please note that at the moment the cluster resources available for long jobs are restricted due to the ongoing patching process.
