run by virtual machines and could be scaled up or down on the fly Amazon played a key role in the development of Cloud computing, starting with Amazon Web Services (AWS) in 2006 [1] http://dfflanders.wordpress.com/2008/10/16/cloud-buzzword-glossary/ Ref: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cloud_computing#Since_2000
storages are treated like public utilities. They are metered and billed by usage. Amazon EC2 Cluster GPU Quadruple Extra Large 22 GiB memory, 33.5 EC2 Compute Units, 2 x NVIDIA Tesla “Fermi” M2050 GPUs, 1690 GB of local instance storage, 64-bit platform, 10 Gigabit Ethernet