Although there has been an exponential increase in the number of academic articles that mention Amazon AWS or Amazon EC2, the service still has little penetration outside the computer sciences. Research teams at universities, with limited budgets and transient computer needs, have the most to gain from the public infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) pricing model. Amazon AWS needs to do more to market itself in colleges by letting professors know how the service works and how it compares with outright server purchases – IDEAS CloudSizer can help with that task.
Below are the mentions of "Amazon EC2" and "Amazon AWS" in a Google Scholar search, organized by year of publication:
Computational biology, physics, mathematics, and finance especially have a lot to gain from public cloud services, yet the number of articles that mention the leading vendor is still paltry when compared with the number of articles that are produced on these subjects.
It is possible that some researchers are using the cloud and not mentioning it in articles. If that is the case, academics should start adding their use of cloud services into papers in order to let others know there are cheaper methods to conduct research – a net gain for all involved.
As JP Morgan has shown, risk calculations can drop from eight hours to 238 seconds when using high performance computing (HPC). Many researchers don't have access to HPC facilities at their colleges, or need to wait in order to take advantage of them. Yet Amazon EC2 offers a supercomputer that can be bought at any time with a credit card. Amazon, GoGrid, Rackspace, and Terremark should market cloud services to academia. Using cloud services will cut research time to publication, increase revenue for cloud providers, and lessen costs for professors. Vendors need to let researchers know about these benefits.
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