The counterpoint to that point is that a significant percentage of scientific computing doesn't care about any of that. They are unlikely to have enough hardwar

The counterpoint to that point is that a significant percentage of scientific computing doesn't care about any of that. They are unlikely to have enough hardware to cause a fire and they don't care about outages or even data loss in many cases. As others have said, it depends on the specifics of the research. In the cases where that stuff matters, the cloud would be better option.