Meltdown and Spectre: Exploits and Mitigation Strategies
In an earlier blog post, we analyzed the performance impact of Meltdown and Spectre on big data workloads in the cloud. In this blog post, we explain these exploits, their mitigation strategies and how they impact Databricks from a security and performance perspective. Meltdown Meltdown breaks a fundamental assumption in operating system security: an...
Meltdown and Spectre’s Performance Impact on Big Data Workloads in the Cloud
Last week, the details of two industry-wide security vulnerabilities, known as Meltdown and Spectre, were released. These exploits enable cross-VM and cross-process attacks by allowing untrusted programs to scan other programs’ memory. On Databricks, the only place where users can execute arbitrary code is in the virtual machines that run Apache Spark clusters. There,...
Learn about Apache Spark’s Memory Model and Spark’s State in the Cloud
Since Apache Spark 1.6, as part of the Project Tungsten, we started an ongoing effort to substantially improve the memory and CPU efficiency of Apache Spark’s backend execution and push performance closer to the limits of the modern hardware. This effort culminated in Apache Spark 2.0 with Catalyst optimizer and whole-stage code generation. Because Spark...
