I based my PhD thesis on the idea of trading computational cloud (or any, really) resources. I went a little further though, and looked at how to design algorithms for the actual marketplaces, which allowed them to optimise how they competed with other marketplaces. A bit like London Stock Exchange competing with the New York Stock Exchange.

While my research was a little blue sky (what isn't) I do think that electronic trading of computation resources is the future, and I think Amazon are ahead of the game in this respect.