I have a similar usecase and run distributed code on machines that are not a part of any cluster at all - just a few random workstations in our group. Julia doesn’t really have built-in features to make it easy, and I’ve written a small helper package: [ANN] DistributedAdhoc.jl: for machines that don't share a common filesystem. It can transfer individual files and directories without extra setup, and share whole julia environments from the local machine.