But the big question is whether running such massive simulation workloads in the cloud is more cost effective than simply booking time on a supercomputer or building an on-premise HPC cluster for it. Neither Google nor Harvard were prepared to disclose costs, however, which suggests to us that it isn't cheap. ®
If it's a collaboration then there's a strong chance that Google are giving them cheap or free compute time. I can see that's a precedent that Google maybe wouldn't too keen on continuing...