I was the person on stage with Urs who ran the demo (I'm a computational biologist who went to Google to help them build this kind of infrastructure, because DOE wasn't doing it). Read more about the demo here: https://cloud.google.com/compute/io

I also helped create the original idea for the Broad collaboration. It was pretty obvious that standard HPC was a waste of money and not designed for high throughput biology, while Google published numerous papers (MapReduce, GFS, Bigtable) that demonstrated they were building infrastructure that was perfect for a wide range of computational biology programs.