[Gate-users] Report - Investigating Intel Meltdown/Spectre patches and Ryzen hyperthreading benchmarks

[Bryan McIntosh]

Hi everyone,

I've been using GATE for a while, and one thing that has been a bit lacking
in our community is benchmarks for various CPU architectures. When the
patches for the Meltdown and Spectre vulnerabilities were revealed to
reduce performance quite substantially in some applications, I wondered how
GATE and Geant4 would be affected by installing them on an older Intel CPU
that is missing some of the alternate instructions used to mitigate some of
the slowdowns. I also was frustrated that no one had released any data on
how well AMD Ryzen CPUs perform in GATE, so I ran a series of benchmarks
investigating the following questions:

1) How does memory speed affect the performance of second-generation AMD
Ryzen CPUs?

2) Does the hyperthreading offered on Ryzen CPUs and some higher-end Intel
CPUs provide any performance benefit for GATE? Previous guidance on this
was that it did not, but that was written years ago with different CPU
architectures on the market.

3) How much performance impact do the Meltdown/Spectre patches have on GATE
simulation times on older (ie. second and third generation Core i5 and Core
i7) Intel CPUs?

I've written my results in a report that is available for download at
https://1drv.ms/b/s!Al3r4ajL5Z4jkLs7LVyGSI_MmA-uzg. Any comments or
questions you have would be welcome, and if anyone is interested in running
the same benchmark scripts on their GATE installation I would be glad to
upload them for testing.

Best regards,

-Bryan McIntosh
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