Methods, systems, and computer program products for determining optimal compute resources for distributed batch based optimization applications are provided herein. A method includes obtaining a size of an input dataset, a size of a model, and a set of batch sizes corresponding to a job to be processed using a distributed computing system; computing, based at least in part on the set of batch sizes, one or more node counts corresponding to a number of nodes that can be used for processing said job; estimating, for each given one of the node counts, an execution time to process the job based on an average computation time for a batch of said input dataset and an average communication time for said batch of said input dataset; and selecting, based at least in part on said estimating, at least one of said node counts for processing the job.