Complete control of EC2 instances from python

I am new to EC2 and I am trying to find a way to get started easily. I have searched internet for tutorials, however I am unable to find a precise answer to my question. I am trying to use amazon EC2 for some personal small scale scientific computing.

I want to do the following programmatically from a single python program:

- create a new instance

- upload a script on that instance that I want to execute

- execute the script on that instance

- obtain the result and save it on my local PC

- close the instance when the script finishes running and the result is copied to my machine

I want to be able to do many such tasks in parallel. So, say I create 10 different variations of the script that I want to run and run them in parallel on 10 different instances. I want to do everything from python and in fact the scripts are also written in python.

Can anybody point me to how is the best way to do it?

If it can't be done with python easily, what are other easy ways to do it? Is there some specific software for this? I take it I am not the first person who has such requirements, how are other people solving this problem?