EPMD and multi-user distributed computation

[Erickson, John]

I have an erlang program that is run similar to an MPI program, where it is deployed over many nodes and erlang starts up on those nodes and must be shut down when the program terminates.  I cannot leave erlang or epmd running on these computers.  Furthermore, many users would like to be able to use this program simultaneously.  I am having problems with epmd run by different users conflicting on the available ports.  Currently I am statically allocating these ports to users with ERL_EPMD_PORT, but this is a pretty cumbersome solution.

Is there a better way to do this?  I could dynamically allocate the port on a single node, but since epmd has to be run on every node in the system, I don't see an easy way to do this.  Why does there need to be an epmd on every node anyway?  Wouldn't a single one suffice?