At North Carolina State University (NCSU), requesting IT services couldn't be simpler, thanks to cloud-computing. 

If, every Monday at 10 a.m., a professor needs 20 computers that have Windows, Microsoft Office, and SolidWorks on them, for instance, the professor simply goes to a web page and chooses from a menu to make group reservations that repeat throughout the semester.

Using the same web page, a faculty researcher could ask for a combination of an Apache server, a database server, and an application server. Or, he or she could ask for a computational cluster or even a low-end supercomputer.

"That can all be done...