Google Follows Amazon Web Services Into On-Demand Supercomputing - The New York Times

Economies of scale

"Using Google, cancer researchers at the Broad Institute used 51,200 computing cores to look at the interrelationships between human genes, the billions of ways they are expressed, the cell lines from some 500 types of cancer, and molecules that perturb those cells. The idea was to sort through billions of data points quickly, looking for promising areas for researchers to seek drugs and treatments.

The analysis, which on a single computer server would have run about 30 years, took a couple of hours, said Chris Dwan, the acting director of Information Technology at Broad. It cost about $4,000."

Google Follows Amazon Web Services Into On-Demand Supercomputing - The New York Times