Over the decades scientists in quantitative research fields have often experienced a tug-of-war between the desire for large (and expensive) shared computing environments and smaller but powerful workstations that a single scientist could procure for their own lab. The trade-off typically is between the cost of managing one's own system versus the control that one gives up with a large shared resource. Sometimes you need a lot of computing power to answer a research question, but you don't need it every day nor for very long. This is where cloud computing steps in. Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), for example, is a commercial web service commonly used by technology startups who want to be able to scale quickly without committing to large upfront costs. Last month, Argonne National Laboratory announced that they have been awarded $32 million in ARRA (American Recovery and Reinvestment Act) funds from the Department of Energy (DOE) to study cloud computing "as a cost-effective and energy-efficient computing paradigm for scientists to accelerate discoveries in a variety of disciplines." The idea is to eventually make cloud computing resources available to scientists to study problems in climate, biology, chemistry, and more.