Re:AMD server CPUs capture highest market share gains from I...
by physicsguy on Monday May 10, 2021 @04:21AM
(#27103818)
Pretty much nobody in the HPC sphere really uses hyperthreading, it's disabled in the BIOS on pretty much every HPC cluster I've ever used.
Re:AMD server CPUs capture highest market share gains from I...
by reacharavindh on Monday May 10, 2021 @04:34AM
(#27103880)
I don’t know why this insane rule of thumb still exists in the HPC world. True that some compute bound jobs that are not designed to make use of HT will be hurt by running in an HT environment. But, not all of HPC work is such purely compute bound. For a scientific field, it is ironic that someone perpetrates this blind rule. Do an A/B test with and without HT for your workload in hand and decide based on results…..
As an example, in our test suite, we found that we get almost a 80% boost by turning on HT.
The right rule is “HT may help or hurt your performance depending on workload. Test and decide”.
Re:AMD server CPUs capture highest market share gains from I...
by physicsguy on Monday May 10, 2021 @11:05AM
(#27106720)
Well, it's not such a bad idea for most cluster admins (me being one at a large UK University). Most of our compute time comes from a small number of very popular MPI parallelised applications, all of which suffer from worse (or at best equivalent) performance with hyperthreading.
All good so far, for (say) HPC where you have people with guns guarding the machines you can turn on all the performance. The issue is that as CPUs have got more complicated, it's increasingly easy to attack the internal state of the processor. This is already possible in a single thread (i.e. the prototypical spectre and meltdown implementations), however imagine what you can do next door to a completely different "core". The processor maintains separation of structure but not of state, so you can use (say) timing side channels to extract information about what your neighbour is up to.
FWIW these issues are more of a problem for Cloud vendors than you or I as they usually require pretty specific knowledge of the hardware being attacked and even then are not easy to pull off.