Amazon: Selling Books, DVDs and Databases?

Amazon Web Services, a subsidiary of Amazon, has expanded its offerings to now allow users free access to their large repository of public information with data ranging from US Census findings to the mapping of the Human Genome.  The model provides researchers with the ability to modify and share these data sets while only paying for any computation or storage services they’ve utilized.

“We can set up a controlled environment in minutes, run our computational analysis for a couple of hours, and shut down the environment,” Dr. Peter Tonellato, a researcher at Harvard Medical School, said in a statement. “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.”

AWS’s end goal is to leverage their capacity in a way that will enable people from a variety of disciplines and industries with the necessary tools to foster greater innovation, more quickly.

[via NY Times]