On Wed, May 26, 2010 at 12:49 PM, Dag Sverre Seljebotn <dagss@student.matnat.uio.no> 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 NumPy-Discussion@scipy.org 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