Cluster Node Auto Discovery

[Codepunk]

Hi Everyone,

I have written a specialized server in python and now I wish to look
at making it scalable. To do this I wish to include automatic
discovery of peer nodes operating on my network. Can anyone provide me
a pointer as to how I do such a thing? By how to do it I mean how does
something like that work at the network level?

ping scan the ip range?
some sort of broadcast packet?
udp request to entire ip range?

I am not asking for code just how is something like that typically
done?