Amazon Web Services (AWS) has added cloud-based high-performance-computing (HPC) services to the portfolio of products it offers to government agencies hosted in a “gated community” data center separate from the infrastructure serving private-sector customers.

Amazon’s HPC capabilities have been available as a service on its Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) for the general population since 2010. Public agencies can now sign up for these services and choose for them to be hosted at Amazon’s GovCloud region – one of four of the cloud’s North America regions.

The company launched the GovCloud data center in August 2011 to serve government agencies that are mandated to store data in data centers accessible physically and logically only by Americans.

Amazon currently provides cloud services to more than 300 US and non-US government agencies. It also lists about 1,500 education institutions as customers.

Teresa Carlson, VP of worldwide public sector at AWS, said the company’s success in the public sector was driven by government mandates for US and European public agencies to maximize the use of cloud-based IT services.

“With the new services and features added today in AWS GovCloud, public sector customers now have greater capabilities to rapidly design, build and deploy high performance applications with AWS’s scalable, secure, low-cost platform,” she said earlier this week.

In addition to HPC instances, Amazon has added its load balancing, automatic scaling, alarm notifications and other services to the list of offerings available out of the GovCloud data center.

Unlike with the EC2 cloud, customers have to be vetted by personal interaction with Amazon to be able to use GovCloud offerings, whereas customers can sign up for the public EC2 cloud instances by filling out an online form and paying by credit card.