[Numpy-discussion] numpy and the Google App Engine

[Dag Sverre Seljebotn]

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.

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