A process on a highly distributed parallel computing system is disclosed. When a first compute node in a first pool is ready to hand-off a task to second pool for further processing, the first compute node may first determine whether a node is available in the second pool. If no node is available from the second pool, then the first compute node may begin performing a primary task assigned to the second pool of nodes, up to the point where a service available exclusively to the nodes of the second pool is required. In the interim, however, one of the nodes of the second pool may become available. Alternatively, an application program running on a compute node may be configured with an exception handling routine that catches exceptions and migrates the application to a compute node where a necessary service is available, as such exceptions occur.