You're right, "cloud computing" is a hopelessly vague term, and the headline by itself does very little to describe what these projects are. In the standard set of buzzwords, "infrastructure as a service" probably comes closest.

But read the first link text carefully -- these are "projects to create cloud computing testbeds". Not creating clouds; creating testbeds in which cloud experiments can be conducted. The users of these testbeds are NOT users of a "cloud"; the users of these testbeds bring up their OWN clouds (or other experiments). In commercial clouds such as EC2, users have control over one or more VMs; instead, these projects are intended to give users control over everything, down to and including the hardware (compute servers, switches, network links...).

As the CloudLab web page says, "the bare metal's the limit".