Sorry, I took a (mental) whack at this... and (naively) said -- "Wow, easy; it's nested-loop time: split the files up into five, 10 member arrays, and then feed the elements of those to the 5 nodes, using code on those nodes to accept the feeds and to assign them to cores."

Then I tried translating that WAG into (pseudo)code.

The translation step failed when I realized I'm missing some data -- which suggests that perhaps many of us are missing data needed to help. (See How do I post a question effectively? and On asking for help ).

So, perhaps you'll speed us toward answers directed to the problem case, rather than the post, by providing a small sample of the filenames in @file, your skills at dispatching data from one node to another (presuming you have the necessary permissions) and -- some code to show us how you plan to "collect the exit codes in an array as they complete (and state whether "complete means 'as a node finishes its assigned work' or means 'as each thread exits.'