Configuration of special devices through adjacent nodes in an experiment
It would be useful to be able to configure (load images, etc.) special devices as part of experiment instantiation. Here, "special devices" means anything that doesn't come up under PXE boot control for setup. Examples include USRP X310 software defined radios, and previously we also had COTS "nano" eNodeB devices from ip.access that required configuration specific to each experiment.
One way to handle these devices is to have network-adjacent nodes in the experiment do the configuration work. As an example, X310 radios are almost always paired with a single compute node. This node could be identified during instantiation, and appropriate commands could be scheduled to run on it to load firmware images, set configuration parameters (if required), etc. Such proxying of device setup would allow us to specify disk images to load and other configuration steps from the profile script in a first class manner.