Ioan Raicu has done a lot of work with dynamic resource provisioning for analysis of astronomy data. He uses grid resources (e.g., TeraGrid) for the most part, but the methods would translate directly to EC2. See, for example: http://people.cs.uchicago.edu/~iraicu/presentations/2009_HPDC09_06-13-09.pdf

Recently I blogged about The Server Labs, a consultancy that specializes in high-performance computing – including on Amazon Web Services. Here’s another story that I found fascinating: nominally it is about how The Server Labs uses Amazon Web Services as a scale-out solution that also implemen...