[Numpy-discussion] numpy and the Google App Engine

[Christopher Hanley]

On Wed, May 26, 2010 at 12:49 PM, Dag Sverre Seljebotn
<dagss at 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
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-- 
Christopher Hanley
Senior Systems Software Engineer
Space Telescope Science Institute
3700 San Martin Drive
Baltimore MD, 21218
(410) 338-4338