Abstract: Systems and methods are provided to allocate application tasks to a pool of processing machines. According to some embodiments, a requestor generates a scope request including an indication of a number of compute units to be reserved. The requestor also provides an application request associated with the scope. A subset of available processing machines may then be allocated to the scope, and the application request is divided into a number of different tasks. Each task may then be assigned to a processing machine that has been allocated to the application request. According to some embodiments, each task is associated with a deadline. Moreover, according to some embodiments an overall cost is determined and then allocated to the requestor based on the number of compute units that were reserved for the scope.