[Myexperiment-discuss] Re: [Taverna-hackers] host a central server for workflow execution in myExperiment?

[Stian Soiland-Reyes]

On Fri, Jul 25, 2008 at 4:50 AM, Wei Tan <address@hidden> wrote:

>    I was curious: is there a use case in which myExperiment should host
> a central server for workflow execution?
> For example, users could browse workflows and datasets in myExperiment
> website, and click a "run me" button to
> run it in a myExperiment server -- that means a user can get a quick
> knowledge of the workflow without the need
> to do anything in the client side (like installing a Taverna workbench).

Yes, I believe that's something myExperiment developers have been looking at.

The current solution allows you to add a Taverna remote execution
service to myExperiment. This service is associated with your user so
that you as a myExperiment user can run any workflow on myExperiment -
you do it from the web site, but the myExperiment web server would
submit it to your execution service to run it there - and getting the
results back again afterwards.


There's some security issues with allowing anyone to run any workflow
in that an evil user could easily register and upload a workflow that
uses a Beanshell script to install say a root kit on the machine that
is hosting the execution service. Thus the service should be running
as a separate user (not your own user, and certainly not as root or
Administrator) - to minimise the damage. It is still possible to for
instance build a workflow that is sending spam or try further attacks
on your local network - making your execution service very unpopular
with the sysadmins.


We've also talked about another approach which is that someone who has
uploaded a workflow can associate the workflow with their execution
service. In that way you can let other people on myExperiment execute
your workflow without having a remote execution service installed and
configured. I'm not sure what is the status on this, if it's been
planned for development yet.

I've copied the myexperiment-discuss list which I suggest we move the
discussion to.

-- 
Stian Soiland-Reyes, myGrid team
School of Computer Science
The University of Manchester
http://www.mygrid.org.uk/dev/blog/