Amazon has a plan to make revolutionary computing tools available to researchers everywhere by hosting massive amounts of public data on its servers.

As of Thursday, the annotated human genome, US Census data, and countless 3D renderings of molecules are available on the elastic servers. And users can upload their own boatload of information, without a fee. But there is a catch: If you want to crunch numbers on their server, or store the output there, it will not be free.

Although the company will charge for its services, it seems committed to making them available to anyone with an internet connection, even scientists who operate on a shoestring budget.

"For over five years AWS has been working to lower the barriers to entry, level the playing field, and make it possible for our customers to be successful based on their ideas, not on their resources," Adam Selipsky of Amazon said in a press release. "Public Data Sets on AWS is the latest of these efforts, and we can't wait to see the discoveries and innovations that could stem from this ecosystem."

So far, that ecosystem seems to be populated by the elite, rather than the unwashed masses. Amazon detracted from its righteous message by providing this endorsement from one of their not-so-underprivileged early adopters.

"Public Data Sets on AWS will enable me and many of my colleagues to collaborate with each other by sharing our commonly used data sets, research environments and tools," Peter Tonellato of Harvard Medical School said in the press release. "We can set up a controlled environment in minutes, run our computational analysis for a couple of hours, and shut down the environment. Our results are completely repeatable. I only pay for the compute time I use, and more importantly I can spend more time focusing on research, not downloading and setting up computational infrastructure."

If the cost of the service were high, it would seem that Amazon's goal is to sound noble while cornering an emerging market — selling processor cycles to wealthy universities. But they appear to be reasonable.

If the company does have an ulterior motive, it may simply be to experiment with and propagate its ideas about cloud computing. Some experts have dismissed the new brand of information technology as a trend, others can't seem to figure out what it is, but one thing is certain: Researchers are accumulating data at an incredible pace, and they will need versatile web-based tools to do their work. For that reason, Amazon could have another lucrative business soon.

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