[gabrielgrant]

dotCloud definitely simplifies deployment over raw AWS, but does cost a bit more on a per-resource-unit basis (understandable, given the platform's value is primarily in the time-savings). dotCloud's focus so far has been on network-based apps (which, in practice means mostly web apps), but there have been people running some big-data/scientific workloads.

As to whether it makes sense for scientific computing, that depends a lot on the type of computation. On the upside, the vast majority of current users are memory-bound, so there is a fair bit of idle CPU sitting around, but even with bursting into other users' unused CPU allocations, if you really need the absolute-highest CPU throughput, you may have to run your own machines.

The resources are sold in "scaling-unit" bundles, which essentially comprise 300MB (burstable) RAM and 10GB (soft limit) disk, with a "reasonable" amount of CPU and bandwidth usage ("reasonable" essentially means unmetered, but monitored for abuse).

That being said, if you have really unusual requirements, drop an email to [e-mail], and I'm sure we can work something out.

full disclosure: I work at dotCloud