  While the requirements of enterprise and web applications have driven the
development of Cloud computing, some of its key features, such as customized
environments and rapid elasticity, could also benefit scientific applications.
However, neither virtualization techniques nor Cloud-like access to resources
is common in scientific computing centers due to the negative perception of the
impact that virtualization techniques introduce.
  In this paper we discuss the feasibility of the IaaS cloud model to satisfy
some of the computational science requirements and the main drawbacks that need
to be addressed by cloud resource providers so that the maximum benefit can be
obtained from a given cloud infrastructure.
