Select public data sets are hosted on Amazon EC2 for free as Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS) snapshots. Amazon EC2 customers can access this data by creating their own personal Amazon EBS volumes, using the public data set snapshots as a starting point. They can then access, modify and perform computation on these volumes directly using their Amazon EC2 instances and just pay for the compute and storage resources that they use. If available, researchers can also use pre-configured Amazon Machine Images (AMIs) with tools like Inquiry by BioTeam to perform their analysis.

To get started using the Public Data Sets on AWS, simply perform these three easy steps:

1. Sign up for an Amazon EC2 account.
2. Launch an Amazon EC2 instance.
3. Create an Amazon EBS volume using the Snapshot ID listed in the catalog above for your chosen snapshot.

Fun, free datasets to play with on Amazon S3/EBS.