swarm

First, if you write process-concurrent code in Elixir/Erlang, it will run on all the cores in your machine. It's automatically locally scalable. The number of processes should range from some small multiple of the no. of cores (say, 10x cores), up to 100k - 1m on a big memory multicore machine. Second, as the other comments say, Elixir/Erlang have very transparent built-in ways to address other nodes, and the programs will scale as expected: more cpus v. network data distribution cost. So good for small tasks that require lots of compute. The native clustering will run to a few dozen nodes over a trusted LAN. But soon, you will want some layer managing the cluster, try Swarm: https://github.com/bitwalker/swarm

No, typically you register a node and instruct it on what processes to run. But there are libraries to help instrument this kind of behavior. For elixir: - https://github.com/derekkraan/horde - https://github.com/bitwalker/swarm