Comment Automation (Score 1) 80
As others have pointed out, deploying EC2 instances automatically is fairly easy using the well-documented EC2 APIs.
The difficult part about distributed computing is synchronizing the work between available instances. For this, you might want to look at RabbitMQ or other queueing servers. One way to do this would be to have one thread (on your computer) generating problem instances, while you spawn spot instances on EC2 as desired, which consume the work and report the results. I suspect you could accomplish something similar using Hadoop/MapReduce.