Absolutely. Also, while the article may be right that a lot of research-group clusters being run out of a closet are only getting 10% utilization, this is not

Absolutely. Also, while the article may be right that a lot of research-group clusters being run out of a closet are only getting 10% utilization, this is not true for shared institutional clusters. Those systems are often hitting utilization of 70, 80, or 90%, and are a lot more cost-effective than a cloud provider. This is why a lot of institutions request that money spent on new compute hardware be contributed to the shared system (in exchange for a large allocation), rather than building tons of tiny clusters.