On Wed, May 26, 2010 at 12:49 PM, Dag Sverre Seljebotn <[email protected]> wrote: > Christopher Hanley wrote: >> Greetings, >> >> Google provides a product called App Engine. The description from >> their site follows, >> >> "Google App Engine enables you to build and host web apps on the same >> systems that power Google applications. >> App Engine offers fast development and deployment; simple >> administration, with no need to worry about hardware, >> patches or backups; and effortless scalability. " >> >> You can deploy applications written in either Python or JAVA. There >> are free and paid versions of the service. >> >> The Google App Engine would appear to be a powerful source of CPU >> cycles for scientific computing. Unfortunately this is currently not >> the case because numpy is not one of the supported libraries. The >> Python App Engine allows only the installation of user supplied pure >> Python code. >> >> I have recently returned from attending the Google I/O conference in >> San Francisco. While there I inquired into the possibility of getting >> numpy added. The basic response was that there doesn't appear to be >> much interest from the community given the amount of work it would >> take to vet and add numpy. > > Something to keep in mind: It's rather trivial to write code to > intentionally crash the Python interpreter using pure Python code and > NumPy (or overwrite data in it, run custom assembly code...in short, > NumPy is a big gaping security hole in this context). This obviously > can't go on in the AppEngine. So this probably involves a considerable > amount of work in the NumPy source code base as well, it's not simply > about verifying. >
Agreed. Perhaps the recently discussed rework of the C internals will better allow a security audit of numpy. At that point perhaps the numpy community could more easily work with Google to fix security problems. > -- > Dag Sverre > _______________________________________________ > NumPy-Discussion mailing list > [email protected] > http://mail.scipy.org/mailman/listinfo/numpy-discussion > -- Christopher Hanley Senior Systems Software Engineer Space Telescope Science Institute 3700 San Martin Drive Baltimore MD, 21218 (410) 338-4338 _______________________________________________ NumPy-Discussion mailing list [email protected] http://mail.scipy.org/mailman/listinfo/numpy-discussion
