Abstract: A method, system and program product for managing system resources in a system with a potentially large number of resources and tasks that need exclusive use of the resources in order to run. The system is comprised of a means of describing resources and resource selection criteria, a means of describing a task's complete resource requirements as a set of named resource selection criteria, a means of supporting alternative resource requirements for a given task and also for prioritizing across all tasks and all resource requirements by attaching a priority to each resource requirement and allowing multiple alternative resource requirements per tasks, and an efficient means of selecting simultaneously one distinct resource from each of N possibly overlapping sets of candidate resources such that any given selection is chosen with equal probability (i.e. is fair).