Alternatives to ssh timeout for hosts with high load?

[Michael Dur]

A couple hundred hosts we manage with ansible are HPC nodes.  Sometimes during normal use a portion of these hosts may be heavily loaded.  In this case the hosts will allow an ssh connection within the timeout constraints, but tasks exec'd by ansible may take a very long time to finish, delaying completion of the ansible-playbook completion for this group by hours.  In our environment ansible runs nightly with the latest configs from git and at this point it's been two days since this group of research systems has completed a run because any given night a few hosts have very high load.  Certainly I could script a check for this situation that excludes hosts, but is there another configuration option than ssh timeout that would better handle this situation?  Is anyone else experiencing this situation?