Amazon Web Services says it’s got more than 300 federal, state and local government agencies and 1,500 education institutions leveraging its cloud for Big Data analytics, HPC, web and collaboration applications, archiving and storage, and disaster relief.

That being so, it’s got new services and features available in the AWS GovCloud (US) region, including the addition of High Performance Computing capabilities.

AWS GovCloud is a US-only region designed to allow US government agencies and contractors to move more sensitive workloads into the cloud by addressing their specific regulatory and compliance requirements, such as ITAR.

Its customers include the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the US Recovery and Accountability Board, the Treasury Department, the State Department, the Agriculture Department, the European Space Agency, NASA, Washington state, Douglas County in Nebraska and Multnomah County in Oregon.

AWS GovCloud now includes EC2, EC2 Cluster Compute instances, S3, Elastic Block Store, Virtual Private Cloud, Identity and Access Management (IAM), Elastic Load Balancing, Auto Scaling, Simple Notification Service (SNS), Simple Queue Service (SQS), CloudWatch and CloudWatch alarms.

Amazon’s educational accounts include MIT, Harvard, Georgetown, NYU, Caltech, Berkeley, the University of San Francisco, the University of Maryland, Minnesota State Colleges and Universities, the University of Washington, Oxford, and the University of Melbourne.

AWS has supported grants worth over $4 million to 350 universities in 35 countries, which lets educators, students and researchers apply for AWS service credits to support their classroom projects.