There is provided a highly distributed multi-core system with an adaptive scheduler. By resolving data dependencies in a given list of parallel tasks and selecting a subset of tasks to execute based on provided software priorities, applications can be executed in a highly distributed manner across several types of slave processing cores. Moreover, by overriding provided priorities as necessary to adapt to hardware or other system requirements, the task scheduler may provide for low-level hardware optimizations that enable the timely completion of time-sensitive workloads, which may be of particular interest for real-time applications. Through this modularization of software development and hardware optimization, the conventional demand on application programmers to micromanage multi-core processing for optimal performance is thus avoided, thereby streamlining development and providing a higher quality end product.