Comment Just a stunt. (Score 1) 54
Amazon makes a killing renting computers. Certain kinds of enterprises really want to pay extra for the privilege of outsourcing some of their IT to Amazon - sometimes it really makes sense and sometimes they're just fooling themselves.
People who do HPC usually do a lot of HPC, and so owning/operating the hardware is a simple matter of not handing that fat profit to Amazon. Most HPC takes place in consortia or other arrangements where a large cluster can be scheduled to efficiently interleave bursty usage patterns. That is, of course, precisely what Amazon does, though it tunes mainly for commercial (netflix, etc) workloads - significantly different from computational ones. (Real HPC clusters often don't have UPS, for instance, and almost always have higher-performance, high-bisection, flat/uniform networks, since inter-node traffic dominates.)