CryoSPARC with EDR/Antivirus (SentinelOne, CrowdStrike) – performance or stability issues?

Troubleshooting
1

Hi everyone,

I would be interested in hearing about real-world experiences running CryoSPARC in environments where endpoint security / EDR solutions (e.g. SentinelOne, CrowdStrike, Defender for Endpoint, etc.) are installed on both the master and compute nodes.

In our case, there is a push from IT to deploy such an agent on our Linux servers (including GPU nodes running CryoSPARC), and I have some concerns regarding:

  • performance impact (especially GPU- and I/O-heavy workloads)
  • potential interference with long-running jobs (hours to days)
  • unexpected process termination due to heuristic detection
  • debugging complexity if jobs fail non-deterministically

CryoSPARC in particular relies on:

  • many subprocesses
  • SSH communication between nodes
  • high I/O workloads

which might look “suspicious” from a security tool perspective.

I would really appreciate feedback from others:

  • Are you running CryoSPARC with EDR/antivirus agents installed?
  • Have you observed performance degradation or instability?
  • Did you need to implement extensive whitelisting?
  • Or do you avoid such tools entirely on compute nodes?

It would also be great to hear from the developers if there are any known issues or recommendations regarding such setups.

Any insights or experiences would be very helpful.

Thanks a lot!

2

Our InfoSec people mandated endpoint security on all Linux machines (starting with CrowdStrike, which was replaced by Defender).

The Scientific Computing team who run our cluster did pretty extensive performance testing and allowed it to be installed on the cluster nodes. Personally I haven’t noticed any obvious performance degredation caused by the endpoint security on our standalone GPU workstations and servers running cryoSPARC (or Relion, etc.).

We didn’t have to do any whitelisting or configuration changes. I don’t know if that reflects the choices made in implementing Defender as to how “hardened” machines are.

We have occasionally had problems with false positives from the SIEM tools they use that flag our data transfers as suspicious. This is a “getting a phone call from InfoSec” problem rather than a “stops us doing our work” problem.

3

thanks for sharing your experience!