This is increasingly true in eg the US, but less likely for early career researchers, even there. And it’s just not true at all in vast other parts of the world. Scientists in the global south can be severely resource-constrained, and they do not already have this kind of access. Or maybe you know of opportunities that are under-utilized?
In terms of how cheap it is, that must be presuming some kind of shared service? If everyone is paying to spin-up a cloud server instance for themselves it can add up very quickly. So again, maybe people need to be made aware of how to gain access?
I’d be thrilled to be wrong about the scale of resources required. I’m curious to hear some estimates of just how expensive it would be to provide some basic data storage and compute for, let’s say, mere hundreds of developing world climate researchers. Say they all have high resolution regional simulations that aren’t already on one of the cloud services.
It’s also okay if this is out of scope, and I’ll retreat back to the democratization thread.